Liquidation of public media to enable audit, reorganisation says dep min
A decision to liquidate Polish state-owned media companies announced on Wednesday will enable them to be audited and their structure reorganised, a deputy culture minister has said.
Speaking on private broadcaster Polsat News, Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus said everything would continue to operate normally.
President Andrzej Duda vetoed on Saturday a budget-related bill that provided PLN 3 billion (EUR 690 million) for public media companies, justifying the decision by saying the companies had been "illegally taken over" after the government made sweeping management changes last week.
Culture Minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz announced on Wednesday that due to Duda's veto, he had decided to put Polish Television (TVP), Polish Radio (PR), and the Polish Press Agency (PAP) into liquidation. The liquidation can be reversed at any time by the companies' owner, the State Treasury.
Scheuring-Wielgus told Polsat News that the money had originally been allocated to TVP by the former ruling party, Law and Justice.
"From what I remember, it was the idea of the head of the National Media Council, Mr Czabanski, because Law and Justice for the eight years they governed, had supported public television every year with such a financial drip feed," she said.
She said Poland's new government had clearly stated that public TV funding would be suspended until after an audit, when a decision would be taken by the prime minister and minister of finance.
Scheuring-Wielgus went on to say that a report had been compiled on TVP, PR and PAP by the state audit office (NIK) and that NIK's president had notified the prosecutor.
"There are many financial and organisational irregularities," she said. "If we're talking about finances, we know that exorbitant sums of money were, for example, earmarked for a handful of people working in public television. The whole of public media constitutes about 4,000 people and we're talking about a handful of people who received exorbitant amounts of money for hate, for hatred, for propaganda, for slandering people. These are the things we have to look into."
She said the results of the audit would be made public and that "public television will finally become public for everybody." (PAP)
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