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Polish prosecutors are investigating whether Orlen, the state-controlled oil and gas company, had ties to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah through its Swiss trading subsidiary.
Prosecutor Małgorzata Adamajtys said on Tuesday the investigation would examine whether Orlen Trading Switzerland (OTS) had “connections to terrorist organizations,” referring to the Iran-backed Hezbollah. Orlen announced in early April that it was reviewing OTS after it suffered a 1.6 billion złoty ($408 million) loss in its trading activities.
The investigation is the latest in a series of investigations into alleged politically motivated actions by Orlen that have been launched since Prime Minister Donald Tusk took office late last year. In February, Tusk fired Orlen boss Daniel Obajtek, who was appointed by the previous right-wing government.
The former head of Orlen Trading Switzerland, named by the public prosecutor only as Samer A., denies any wrongdoing. He left the company in February when Obajtek and other senior executives at Orlen were laid off.
“I completely deny any contact with Hezbollah or any other political group,” he told the Financial Times on Wednesday. He said he was now preparing his own lawsuits in “various courts” to clear his name. “I really have no idea about these fairy tales.”
The investigation was launched after Tusk said Monday he had contacted the attorney general about “the billions in losses and possible ties to Hezbollah.”
Israel’s ambassador to Warsaw, Yacov Livne, congratulated the Polish authorities for opening the investigation: “Hezbollah terrorists and the Iranian regime pose a major threat to global security,” he wrote on the social media platform X.
Adamajtys said she wanted to find out whether Orlen’s previous management ignored warnings from its own internal security team about OTS. She also questioned how the head of the Swiss subsidiary could approve transactions that resulted in large losses.
“An individual who makes advance payments without fulfilling the first tranches of certain deliveries is not a good CEO and should not be the CEO of this or any other company,” she said.
But Samer A., who has Polish citizenship, said: “I have not violated anything against the standards of the oil trade.” He accused the Polish prosecutor of behaving “more like a human resources officer than a law enforcement officer, since she obviously had emotional accusations against me.”
A spokesman for the Swiss Federal Prosecutor’s Office said that no investigation was currently underway against Orlen’s Swiss subsidiary in the country, despite the investigation in Poland.
Polish prosecutors are separately investigating other Orlen transactions carried out during Obajtek’s tenure as CEO, as well as his domestic fuel pricing policies.
In February, Poland’s Court of Audit released a report alleging that Orlen sold assets for $1.24 billion less than they were worth to complete a merger with Lotos, its smaller domestic rival. According to the Polish Audit Office, as part of the deal, Saudi Aramco underpaid about 3.5 billion złoty to acquire a 30 percent stake in the Gdańsk oil refinery from Lotos.
During last year’s election campaign, Tusk accused Obajtek of abusing Orlen to help the Law and Justice party (PiS) stay in power. He also claimed that Orlen used his media ownership to promote PiS.
Tusk called Obaytek “one of Putin’s biggest oligarchs” and accused him of delaying the decision to stop imports of cheap Russian oil after Moscow’s all-out attack on Ukraine in 2022.
Obajtek has denied any wrongdoing. After his dismissal from Orlen, PiS put his name on its list of candidates for the European Parliament elections in June.
Additional reporting by Sam Jones in Berlin