Polish diplomats and their accomplices are said to have sold work visas abroad for years. For the opposition it is the “biggest affair of the 21st century”. But the ruling PiS party is downplaying the scandal a few weeks before the election.
In the middle of the fields of northern Mazovia, 100 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, cranes rise into the cloudless sky. Huge excavators level the ground, trucks bring in earth. Here, on the outskirts of the 200-inhabitant village of Stara Biala, one of the largest chemical complexes in Europe is to be built, built by the Polish state-owned company Orlen, which is close to the right-wing conservative PiS government. In the spring, the Korean-Spanish construction consortium built a container city on the edge of the facility for 6,000 workers to be deployed on the construction site. They were recruited in the Philippines, India and Bangladesh.