PAIIZ to inherit more debt than previously declared

By Karol Chlipalski

The Polish Agency for Information and Foreign Investment (PAIIZ), a newly-formed organization charged with attracting foreign investors to Poland, will not start operations as planned. Created from the merger of the Polish Information Agency (PAI) and the Polish Foreign Investment Agency (PAIZ), the new agency has inherited a much larger amount of liabilities from its predecessors than was previously known.

A source in the Ministry of Economy, Labor and Social Policy said that PAI was much more heavily in debt than the previous president of the board had made public. PAI's real debt amounts to zł. 3.2 million (€720,000), and not zł. 2.5 million (€560,000) as Rafał Steffen, head of PAI, had declared previously.

Additionally, it has turned out that PAIZ is short about zł. 300,000 (€67,000) for salaries. Some employees of the agency have expressed their intention to take legal action over the matter.

Andrzej Szejna, the undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Economy, Labor and Social Policy supervising the creation of PAIIZ, believes that Andrzej Zdebski, the newly appointed head of PAIIZ, will manage to solve this problem.

"PAI owns real estate that is not necessary to the functioning of the company, and that could be sold off," Szejna said. In his opinion, a negative financial situation should not disturb the fulfillment of the new agency's tasks.

"The situation is not so bad, which does not mean that there are no problems to be solved," added Zdebski. He promised that there would not be any disruption in PAIIZ's operations.

Registration of the new company could last even a month and a half, as appropriate documents were submitted to the court a week ago.

Czech offensive

Meanwhile, representatives of CzechInvest, the Czech equivalent of PAIIZ, are working to move investors in Poland to the Czech Republic. According to the daily Puls Biznesu, the office of one of the foreign car producers in Silesia was visited by two people equipped with brochures, which aimed to convince investors to close down companies in Poland and move production south of the border.

"I would be very surprised if the Czech government has performed this sort of negative publicity," Szajna commented on the allegations. "It is not allowed in the business world, and in the competition between two countries, even less so."

"We will work to make an offer to foreign investors that would be competitive enough so nobody would dare run this sort of campaign," said PAIIZ's Zdebski.