- Although journalists have been reporting for years that the police are protecting the villa of the PiS president, and in June they revealed that it is permanent and multi-person, the Ministry of Interior and Administration denies this information
- Deputy Speaker of the Sejm Małgorzata Gosiewska decided in July that an MP may not ask about the protection of the villa by the police, although another MP could have done so in February
- The decision of the marshal contradicts the function of the Sejm, which also exercises a control function over the actions of the executive power – says prosecutor Krzysztof Parchimowicz
- Together with the former deputy police chief Adam Rapacki, we are counting the costs of police protection of Jarosław Kaczyński’s villa
The media has been reporting for several years that the villa of PiS president Jarosław Kaczyński is protected by the police. In February this year, a member of the Civic Coalition, Adam Szłapka, asked Mariusz Kamiński, Minister of Interior and Administration, about the legal basis of police protection, the number of officers involved and the cost. Then, Minister Kaminski replied that the police did not protect the building.
However, in June, TVN24 journalists revealed that it guards the building every day even 18 policemen on three shifts. After several weeks of observation, journalists stated that two uniformed officers were usually parked in a police car in front of the PiS president’s house, another two were patrolling the area, and there were often two plain-clothes policemen in the area.
Why can’t an MEP ask?
In June, another MP from the KO, Michał Jaros, sent an inquiry to the head of the Ministry of Interior and Administration. He asked virtually the same questions as his predecessor: about the legal basis of police protection, the number of officers involved and the monthly cost of protecting the villa, adding the question of “when did such strong protection of President Kaczyński’s villa begin”.
This time, however, the presidium of the Sejm did not act upon his question 1111. In the general justification of this decision from July, Małgorzata Gosiewska, Deputy Speaker of the Sejm, wrote that “the query does not meet the requirement specified in Art. 195 paragraph. 1 of the Sejm regulations ”.
– The public has the right to know how much taxpayers it costs to protect the villa, which would seem to be a private MP, but also to know for what reasons it is so strongly protected and how many policemen are involved in it every day. After all, these costs are borne by all of us, and the policemen protecting the president’s villa at that time do not protect Polish women and Poles, they are not on the streets. Rejecting this question is incomprehensible not only for me, but also for my constituents, and it clearly shows that someone wants to hide something very much, Mr Jaros told us.
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The provision with which Marshal Gosiewska justified the rejection of MP Jaros’s inquiry is very broad and says that “parliamentary inquiries are made on individual matters concerning the internal and foreign policy conducted by the Council of Ministers and public tasks carried out by the government administration”. What happened between February and June that MPs can no longer ask questions about the villa of President Kaczyński? We asked experienced lawyers whether Mr Jaros could actually submit an inquiry on the basis of the quoted article.
– Interpellation or a parliamentary question concerns things that the deputy should find out – prosecutor Krzysztof Parchimowicz, president of the Association of Prosecutors “Lex Super Omnia” replied to us. – There were no secret elements, it was about organizational and financial issues. Recipe [na podstawie którego nie nadano biegu sprawie] it is so broad that it covers all issues related to the sphere of government activity. The decision of the marshal contradicts the function of the Sejm, which also exercises a control function over the actions of the executive power.
– If someone is a deputy, he has the right to submit inquiries to public authorities, because it is related to the performance of his mandate – added attorney Konrad Orlik, managing partner of Orlik & Partners. – Therefore, if the marshal refused to give a run to his query, she should justify precisely why she did it. In order for an MP to be able to ask about an issue that is socially important, she should write to him that we refuse to do so, but if you had asked in a different way, then we would have responded. This refusal should be a sign of the situation in which this information could be provided.
Why is the police protecting Kaczyński’s villa?
Due to the powerlessness of the deputies, we decided to ask the head of the Ministry of Interior and Administration, this time in the form of a press release. After two days of waiting, we received a one-sentence response from the ministry: “We inform that the Police do not carry out tasks in this area”.
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On the same day we went to the villa of Jarosław Kaczyński and we did not notice any patrol in its immediate vicinity. However, there is more than enough evidence of the villa’s continued protection over the past months and years.
That is why we decided to check for ourselves in which cases the police can protect different people and how much this protection may cost. We asked Superintendent Adam Rapacki, former Deputy Chief of Police and former Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Interior and Administration to answer these questions.
– Police officers can protect people at risk in connection with criminal proceedings or other situations – Superintendent Rapacki told us. – But such protection applies to situations of real danger, where police activities are often carried out to avoid the danger or to identify the perpetrators of such threats. In the case of parliamentarians or ministers, the consent for protection is issued by the Minister of the Interior and Administration, but then the protection is carried out by the State Protection Service, not the police, and there must also be a real concern for the safety of this person.
In an interview with us, Superintendent Rapacki expressed his surprise that during the PiS rule, extremely many politicians used the protection of the SOP, citing the example of Beata Kempa and Jarosław Zieliński.
How much does it cost to protect Kaczyński’s villa?
A more complicated task is to calculate the costs of police protection of the villa of the PiS president. When asked about the costs of the policeman’s work, Superintendent Rapacki said that the costs of the policeman’s labor should be calculated and the necessary equipment should be added to it.
A private policeman earns PLN 3875 in Poland, so excluding weekends, his working day costs about PLN 190. Multiplying this sum by 18 policemen, the result is PLN 3,420. We carefully calculated the costs of the policemen’s equipment, the cars involved and the transport of officers to the site at around PLN 1,600. This gives you a total of PLN 5,000 a day. According to this very conservative estimate, the annual cost of protecting Jarosław Kaczyński’s villa by the police is PLN 1,800,000. PLN.
The first media reports about the 24-hour protection of President Kaczyński’s villa by the police appeared in “Duży Format” in October 2017. The authors of the article then informed that the building had been protected for about two months. According to those first reports, the villa was protected by at least four policemen a day.
Due to the silence of the Ministry of Interior and Administration, it is difficult to establish the number of officers and equipment involved in protecting the building over the years. However, it can be safely assumed that if, since 2017, the police in a smaller or larger number of police constantly guard the house of the PiS president, the state has spent several million zlotys on this purpose. Without any legal basis.
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