The largest Polish beneficiary on the list of projects to be funded from the European Union’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) programme is a private company led by a politician from Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s party that does not hold a licence to manufacture weapons and ammunition.
According to portal Niezależna, one of the companies, identified as a supplier of arms, that will benefit from the SAFE funds is the Polska Amunicja ammunition and arms company managed by Paweł Poncyljusz, a former MP for Tusk’s Civic Coalition party (KO).
It is projected to receive as much as €2.3 billion from the EU SAFE loan to produce 300,000 units of ammunition.
The company currently has no independent production capacity and, according to liberal portal Onet the company, which employs just seven staff, does not have a production facility currently because it does not possess the licences required by law.
Responding to an enquiry from opposition Conservative (PiS) MP Bartosz Kownacki, the deputy interior minister Magdalena Roguska confirmed that Polska Amunicja only has a licence to trade rather than produce or store arms.
“This means it can only act as an intermediary. And yet this intermediary was to receive as much as €2.3 billion!,” wrote Kownacki, who is a former PiS deputy defence minister, on his X platform account on March 20.
Poncyljusz denies there is anything irregular with regard to his company’s participation since it is part of a larger WBD Group which is partly owned by the publicly owned Polish Industrial Development Agency. He said the company he heads was created during the lifetime of the last PiS government led by Mateusz Morawiecki.
According to Polish broadcaster wPolsce24, the company was publicly owned until the arrival of the Tusk government but became a private entity in 2024 after which Poncyljusz became its head.
The same broadcaster in February tried to find the company’s office in Warsaw under the address registered for it. There was no office nor even a sign of the company under that Warsaw address, claims wPolsce24.
PiS MEP’s Tobiasz Bocheński and Jacek Ozdoba have reported the matter to Poland’s anti-corruption agency (CBA).
“We should not be in a situation in which the government effectively privatises a company and then directs huge contracts its way,” said Bocheński.
“This could be another EU funding scandal like the one over payments to the hospitality sector from post-pandemic funds where it was found the relatives and friends of the ruling party were benefitting hugely from funding for luxuries such as yachts,” argued Ozdoba.
Head of PiS’s parliamentary caucus, the former defence minister Mariusz Błaszczak, said: “The lack of transparency over the way SAFE funding is to be disbursed was justification enough for President Nawrocki’s rejecting the legislation on the programme.”
The Polish centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, though, has decided to go ahead with accessing €44 billion worth of loans from the SAFE mechanism. That is despite the fact that its legislative proposal to set up a delivery mechanism for the disbursal of the funds has been vetoed by the opposition Conservatives (PiS) allied President Karol Nawrocki.
SAFE is a loan programme designed to help EU member states rearm themselves. Loans from it are not being taken up by every EU member state. Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands have chosen not to participate as they have found they can access capital markets for loans priced at less than the three per cent the EU’s programme will be charging the loans.
In Poland the SAFE loans became a bone of contention between the opposition and the Tusk government with the former arguing that Poland will end up repaying twice the money borrowed over the 40 year duration period of the loan. It added that the money could be stopped anyway as a result of it being covered by the EU’s conditionality mechanism under which the last PiS government had post-pandemic funding blocked.
Nawrocki vetoed the government’s bill and together with Poland’s central bank proposed the money for rearmament should come from profits generated by Poland’s considerable gold reserves rather than the EU’s SAFE programme.
He and the opposition have alleged that the government’s decision to proceed with the EU loan is unconstitutional since large borrowing commitments require legislation.
The Tusk government, though, has pointed to the fact that the last PiS government borrowed heavily in South Korea and the US to buy arms in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 whereas the SAFE loan funds, the Tusk administration claims, will largely be used to develop the Polish arms industry.
