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Comment by bitcharmer | Hacker News Reader

Being a 40+ year old Pole I am yet to see a single case of corruption in public sector be prosecuted.

Maciej Zalewski (a co-creator of Kaczyński's first party - Porozumienie Centrum) remains the only high-level politician I know of in Poland that was sentenced for corruption and actually went to jail.

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maciej_Zalewski_(filolog)

He warned Bagsik and co. (who stole millions of public money through the famous Art-B company and escaped to Israel) that the police wants to imprison them - so they managed to escape. Bagsik later confirmed that they shared some of that money with Porozumienie Centrum's business named Telegraf. Somehow only the less important guy (Zalewski) went to jail, but Kaczyński brothers weren't prosecuted.

But there's a lot of low level corruption that is exposed, it's just usually ignored by country-wide media, because that corruption is local. For one example: https://samorzad.pap.pl/kategoria/prawo/prawomocny-wyrok-byl...

> but Kaczyński brothers weren't prosecuted.

Is there any indicator they should have been in this case?

Their company "Telegraf" got cheap credit from Bagsik just before.

I haven't seen any evidence of corruption here - just pure malice and monopolistic behavior.

There is corruption everywhere (though obviously not uniformly distributed). It requires active, dynamic efforts to counteract. If you don't see some evidence of successful prosecution, that itself is informative.

The corruption would be if this is not punished. By for example Newag getting a massive fine.

It's a criminal case. Money is not enough.

It might be different if you manage to get your competitor fined 500k

500k is fraction of train cost. Eventual fine, to work properly, would need to be in hundreds of millions.

I think the 500k was a reference to the fine the third-party service company (SPS Mieczkowski) had to pay due to the failure that it now turns out was intentionally caused by Newag.

I think that there are two separate issues here:

1. train manufacturer bricking trains - malice and monopolism as you say

2. prosecutors failing to bring court cases and convictions for train manufacturers - incompetence or more likely corruption.

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