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Tender to overhaul Polish presidential plane was fixed: report

PR dla Zagranicy
Paweł Kononczuk 03.03.2017 10:27
Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW) has informed prosecutors about suspicions that a 2009 tender to overhaul the Polish president’s plane that crashed the following year was fixed, the Gazeta Polska Codziennie daily has reported.
The site of the Polish presidential plane crash in 2010. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsThe site of the Polish presidential plane crash in 2010. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Military Counterintelligence Service has also notified prosecutors about irregularities in the work of Polish officers in connection with the tender and the overhaul of the Tu-154 M plane, the niezalezna.pl website reported.

The Polish presidential plane crashed on 10 April 2010 in Smolensk, western Russia. It was carrying 96 people on board. All died, including President Lech Kaczyński, as well as top military and government officials.

Piotr Bączek, the head of the Military Counterintelligence Service, recently told Poland’s Telewizja Republika that the SKW was to inform prosecutors about negligence and mistakes related to the 2010 crash by the service’s former bosses.

niezalezna.pl reported that one of the “people with direct knowledge of the tender” has testified that six months before the renovation of the presidential plane, officials from the Polit Elektronik company knew that they would win the tender for the overhaul.

On 22 February 2009, a few weeks before the formal decision to award the tender, officials from the Aviakor company in Samara and the Saturn plant in Rybinsk (the eventual Russian contractors and subcontractors for repairs on the Polish presidential plane) signed an agreement with a Polit Elektronik official, according to niezalezna.pl.

The overhaul was expensive - it was the equivalent at the time to the cost of a new aircraft of the same class as the presidential plane, according to Gazeta Polska Codziennie.

niezalezna.pl said there are also concerns about how the SKW monitored the tender. The website reported that just one soldier was sent to Samara as an observer.

His role was to observe only those repairs that were carried out in Samara.

Meanwhile, niezalezna.pl added, an overhaul of the plane’s engines was carried out in Rybinsk - more precisely in the Saturn plant, which since 2009 had been controlled by a former KGB agent and a close friend of Vladimir Putin, with whom the current Russian president had worked in the 1980s in East Germany.

Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party, which came to power in late 2015, has reopened a probe into the Smolensk presidential plane crash.

Some PiS politicians have claimed the presidential plane was brought down by an explosion, and have challenged a report under Poland’s previous government which concluded the crash was an accident.

The PiS party is headed by Jarosław Kaczyński, twin brother of Polish President Lech Kaczyński, who died in the crash in Smolensk.

Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service is a secret service responsible for the protection of the country against internal threats to national defence, security and the combat capacity of Poland’s armed forces.

(pk)

Source: niezalezna.pl

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