Train of Events
On 22 July 2002, Lew Rywin called in at the office of Adam Michnik, editor of Poland's largest daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza. In exchange for a bribe of 17.5 million USD, Rywin offered to arrange for a change in a draft law aimed at limiting the print media's influence on radio and television, which would have been in Michnik's favour - as the original draft would have prevented the paper's publishing house, Agora S.A. from taking over the private TV station Polsat or the second channel of Poland's public TV broadcaster TVP. Rywin said he was acting on behalf of what he called a "group in power" which wanted to remain anonymous but possibly included then prime minister Leszek Miller of the post-communist SLD.
Michnik secretly recorded the conversation and started investigations to establish the identity of the "group in power". He also arranged a meeting between Miller, Rywin, and himself in Miller's office. When Miller denied any involvement in the deal Rywin had put forward, according to the other persons present, Rywin lost his composure and even spoke of committing suicide. Rywin himself later claimed to have been under the influence of alcohol.
Only after the Gazeta Wyborcza's alleged investigations had remained inconclusive, on 27 December 2002 - half a year after the incident, which cast some doubts on the real role of the newspaper in the affair - the paper printed the partial record of Michnik's conversation with Rywin, thus starting the actual scandal. However other papers had reported parts of the story earlier (e.g. weekly magazine Wprost )
In January 2003, the Polish parliament (Sejm) created a special committee to conduct an investigation into the circumstances of the affair.
A separate penal prosecution resulted in Rywin being sentenced to two years in prison and a 100,000 PLN fine for 26 April 2004 fraud, as the court concluded that the "group in power" did not exist and Rywin had been acting on his own initiative. On 10 December 2004, the Warsaw court of appeals repealed this sentence, sentencing Rywin to a reduced term of two years for "paid protection" on behalf of a still anonymous group.
Read more about this topic: Rywin Affair
Famous quotes containing the words train of, train and/or events:
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The train was crammed, the heat stifling. We feel out of sorts, but do not quite know if we are hungry or drowsy. But when we have fed and slept, life will regain its looks, and the American instruments will make music in the merry cafe described by our friend Lange. And then, sometime later, we die.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has some indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)