Editor's note: Enough is enough for the EC

The accusations are serious and concrete - Poland hinders the free movement of capital and thus breaches EU treaties. Court proceedings, due to start on Wednesday, are going take a couple of months. Quite a lot of time will lapse before Poland actually appears before the court; this time could and should be used to ease the dispute.

So far there was no sign of it on the part of the Polish government, in fact quite the opposite - Poland has been bickering with Brussels. It sent a letter to the European Court of Justice suing Brussels' decision that the merger of the two Polish banks, BPH and Pekao SA, is a natural result of the European transaction in which Italian Unicredito took over German HVB. According to Brussels, the merger doesn't pose a threat to competition on the European or Polish markets.

However, the Polish government claims the opposite. It says the merger will trigger excessive capital concentration in the Polish financial sector. It is worth stressing that Law and Justice advocated blocking the merger all the way through its electoral campaign.

It is also an open secret that the government opposes the merger because it will result in the birth of a huge lender threatening the dominant position of the biggest bank on the market, state-owned PKO BP.

So will Poland be able to ease the dispute with Brussels? A lot depends on Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz and his personal negotiations with Alessandro Profumo, the CEO of Unicredit. What is reassuring is that the PM publicly stated that he is eager to mitigate the conflict and that he is keen to meet up with Profumo.

He won't reveal the direction the talks might take but one has to believe that the government will change the tone it has used to date in discussions with the Italian bank. The stance Poland has taken so far does not work - unless it wants to gain the label of the EU's most vexatious litigant.

Eliza Durka

Editor-in-chief