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Man sought over debt service scam to be extradited to Poland

PR dla Zagranicy
Grzegorz Siwicki 06.09.2018 14:00
US authorities have approved the extradition to Poland of a businessman who in 2005 was sentenced for masterminding a debt service scam in his country, according to reports.
Photo: Maklay62/pixabay/CC0 Creative CommonsPhoto: Maklay62/pixabay/CC0 Creative Commons

The businessman, Dariusz Przywieczerski, will be extradited from the United States after he fled Poland more than 12 years ago, public broadcaster TVP Info reported on Thursday.

For most of the time he was sought by Polish law enforcers, Przywieczerski lived peacefully in America, where he ran several companies, TVP Info said on its website.

Przywieczerski was formerly CEO of Universal Foreign Trade Enterprise and a central figure in a scandal surrounding the Foreign Debt Service Fund (FOZZ), a government agency that was set up shortly before the fall of communism in Poland in 1989 and tasked with buying Polish debt through intermediaries.

A Warsaw court in March 2005 sentenced Przywieczerski to three-and-a-half years in prison for being part of the FOZZ scandal and for siphoning around USD 1.5 million out of the Fund’s coffers, the tvp.info website said.

However, Przywieczerski did not show up in the courtroom to hear the verdict at the time; instead he disappeared, the website said.

He is thought to have left Poland immediately and lived on money he had in foreign bank accounts, tvp.info said.

Przywieczerski lived and owned real estate in Belarus before he eventually escaped to the United States, according to tvp.info.

In April 2006, Interpol tracked him to America where he ran several companies, including a nail warehouse, according to tvp.info. In July that year, the Warsaw district court filed an extradition request to the US Department of State. In December, the Americans asked for more paperwork and the case began to drag on and was soon forgotten, tvp.info reported.

It noted that Przywieczerski was once an employee of the Central Committee of the communist-era Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). After the fall of communism, he became CEO of Universal, a foreign trade enterprise that he successfully took to the stock exchange.

In the 1990s, Universal held a controlling stake in a company that published Trybuna, a left-leaning newspaper in Poland, tvp.info reported.

(gs/pk)

Source: tvp.info, wpolityce.pl, IAR

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