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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Poland’s main opposition party, the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS), has suspended two of its members following reports that, when they served as ministers in the former PiS government, their ministry approved the sale of land that was designated as part of a major transport infrastructure project.

The land, which was sold to a businessman from a large family food firm, is likely to rise in value at least tenfold, costs that may then pass on to the state if it has to buy the land back, reports news website Wirtualna Polska (WP), which broke the story today.

Państwo straciło strategiczną dla CPK działkę. Zgodzili się na to politycy PiS

🖋️ @SzJadczak https://t.co/KwTyRiz7Dr

— Wirtualna Polska (@wirtualnapolska) October 27, 2025

The controversy relates to the Central Communication Port (CPK), a planned “mega-airport” and transport hub that was a flagship project of the former PiS government, and which has continued to be developed since they lost power in December 2023.

A major part of CPK is a series of high-speed rail lines that will run across Poland, centred around the planned airport, which is located between Warsaw and the city of Łódź.

One such rail line is planned to run from the airport to Warsaw, helping bring passengers to and from the capital quickly. Part of the planned route runs through a plot of state-owned agricultural land that was sold to Piotr Wielgomas on 1 December 2023, just a couple of weeks before PiS left office, found WP.

 

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Wielgomas is vice president of Dawtona, a large Polish food company. The business is a family concern; its CEO, Andrzej Wielgomas, is Piotr’s father. In the months before the sale of the land, the PiS agricultural minister, Robert Telus, had at least twice visited the company.

It was then Telus’s deputy, Rafał Romanowski, who signed off on the sale of the plot to Piotr Wielgomas. The land had previously belonged to the National Support Centre for Agriculture (KOWR), a state agency operating under the authority of the agriculture ministry, and had been leased by Piotr Wielgomas.

The decision to sell the land came despite strong protests from the managers of the CPK project, who told KOWR that the plot had key strategic value for their project and its value would significantly increase, reports WP.

WP has calculated – and confirmed with experts and other sources – that the land Wielgomas paid 22.8 million zloty (€5.4 million) for will be worth between 200 and 400 million due to the development of the CPK project.

On his first full day in office, Poland’s new president presented the first bill that he wants to be considered by parliament.

It is intended to ensure that the government completes a planned new “mega-airport” on schedule and without scaling it back https://t.co/mRBG3mAT7t

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) August 8, 2025

Responding to questions from WP, Telus said that he had never discussed the sale of the land during his visits to Dawtona. The firm issued a statement saying the same. It also claims Piotr Wielgomas was unaware until this year of what the CPK project would mean for the plot he was buying.

“I didn’t make this decision, nor do I fully understand what’s going on,” said Telus later on Monday, quoted by news website Interia. “It’s hard for me to say anything more, as I only learned about this from the media.”

Later on Monday, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who leads the coalition that replaced PiS in office in December 2023, announced that “the scam described by WP has been at the prosecutor’s office for several months”.

Mateusz Morawiecki zawsze umiał w działki, a pisowski minister od CPK Horała tłumaczył, że jak kraść, to tylko zgodnie z procedurami. Mam dla nich złą wiadomość: sprawa przekrętu opisanego przez WP od kilku miesięcy jest w prokuraturze. Zgodnie z procedurami oczywiście.

— Donald Tusk (@donaldtusk) October 27, 2025

Susbequently, PiS spokesman Rafał Bochenek announced that Telus and Romanowski had been suspended from the party by its leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, “until the matter of the sale of the plot belonging to KOWR is clarified”.

However, Bochenek’s statement also cast doubt on the actions of the current government. He noted that regulations allow KOWR to attempt to recover land its sells, but that had not been done.

“Could this be due to the fact that the family of the buyer of the plot is a significant sponsor of party initiatives and campaigns of the Civic Platform/Coalition?” he said, referring to Tusk’s party.

WP notes in its report that, since the change of government in 2023, members of the Wielgomas family became supporters of the new administration, including donating a total of 130,000 zloty to the presidential election campaign this year of Tusk’s candidate, Rafał Trzaskowski.

In a statement, CPK revealed that it had last year “contacted KOWR, expecting action to restore the properties to [the ownership of] the State Treasury, which would allow them to be used for purposes related to CPK investments”.

Meanwhile, the current government’s plenipotentiary for CPK, Maciej Lasek, confirmed that they have been aware of the issue relating to this plot since completing an audit of the whole project last year.

“We have been trying to regain this land through negotiations and an amicable settlement,” he said, quoted by Interia, adding that in the end the “the prosecutor’s office has initiated proceedings”.

“It was probably not a simple oversight, but a political deal that led to the state-owned company suffering significant losses,” claimed Lasek.

The state auditor has released a damning report on the former government’s implementation of plans to build a new “mega-airport”.

It found that a series of “costly mistakes” were made, resulting in delays and hundreds of millions of zloty in lost revenue https://t.co/LOEUCh8ME0

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) September 4, 2025

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: MRiRW (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.