Presidential veto on cryptoassets bill sustained in lower house voting
The Sejm, the lower house of Polish parliament, has voted to uphold the veto President Karol Nawrocki issued to the bill regulating the country's cryptocurrency market, despite the government's strong lobbying to override the presidential decision.
The bill, which Nawrocki refused to sign into law on December 1, was to bring the cryptoassets market under the supervision of Poland's Financial Supervision Authority (KNF), in line with the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MICA).
The veto, one of 17 Nawrocki issued in the first four months of his presidency, ignited immediate and strong condemnation from Poland's top government officials, with Tusk calling it "indefensible and unjustifiable."
On Thursday, Speaker of the Sejm Wlodzimierz Czarzasty announced that a vote would be held the following day to overturn the presidential veto, which the lower house can do with a supermajority of three-fifths of votes. The vote must be held with at least half of the statutory number of members of the Sejm present, and if successful, it obligates the president to sign the bill into law.
On Friday morning, in a closed-door session, Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the Sejm about the context of the bill, passing crucial information regarding state security.
In a later open debate, Tusk argued that the bill was equipping the state with vital tools to control the part of the cryptocurrency market which is infiltrated by adversarial Russian and Belarusian entities as well as by organised crime groups and foreign intelligence agents.
The presidential aide Zbigniew Bogucki presented a contrasting view and defended the veto as preventing from excessive, unclear and disproportional regulation of the cryptocurrency market. He also accused Tusk of presenting MPs with a "false" choice of backing the "Russian mafia" or the government's bill, offering to work together in the future on different ways to regulate the cryptoassets space.
In the subsequent vote, 243 MPs were for passing the bill despite the president's earlier veto, 192 were against, and none abstained. For the bill to pass through the Sejm during Friday's session, it would have required backing from 261 MPs.
Later on Friday, Tusk told reporters in the lower house that the issue of the cryptoassets bill was "nasty," adding that, in his view, nothing similar had happened in Poland since 1989. "We are dealing with very dangerous phenomena, involving Russian money and the mafia... Money from these environments, which are extremely dangerous for Poland, was also being used for political promotion," he said.
He added that the bill, which "was meant to curb this activity, was vetoed by those who are, in some suspicious way, close to these matters." "We will submit this bill again, shortly. I am not saying today, but we will continue to urge the president and the [socially conservative Law and Justice] PiS opposition not to do this, because they are doing something very harmful," the prime minister said.
Asked whether the government was ready to negotiate with Nawrocki to prepare a joint draft, he replied that "there is no time." "We need this bill now to block bad scenarios and to have the tools to control the situation. I will call for its immediate adoption, without unnecessary delay, upon reconsideration," Tusk said.
Nawrocki challenged Tusk's messaging regarding the crypto-assets bill, telling the YouTube channel Kanal Zero on Saturday that since the draft's inception in December last year, no one has raised the issue of a foreign intelligence threat in this context.
"It came up suddenly when it turned out that... there might be a veto," he said.
Nawrocki also claimed that he had not been informed about any cryptocurrency risks. "Was the president cut off from information provided by Polish intelligence services regarding threats to the cryptocurrency market? Something doesn't add up here," he said, suggesting that someone wants to sow social unrest around the draft law. (PAP)
wpb/mj/aj/mmr/ grg/
