Substandard fuels plague Orlen's retail network

PKN Orlen on Thursday acknowledged substandard fuels are sold in its petrol stations after Dow Jones Newswires asked a top executive about internal documents describing the problem. Although the executive, Deputy President Sławomir Golonka, said the problem was contained and measures were taken to resolve it, other PKN Orlen directors complained that senior managers have been slow to correct a problem in most of the company's 2,000 gas stations. According to Dow Jones Newswires, an internal investigation of 22 Orlen service stations in southern Poland revealed company employees were selling gasoline of unknown origin and pocketing the proceeds. An October quality check at 13 regional offices of PKN Orlen's LPG units, Orlen Gaz, found LPG sold in 12 branches did not meet minimum Polish norms. Golonka said the company had to keep a sense of proportion, since estimates that it might be losing zł. 100 million via bootleg sales pale against 2002 sale revenues of zł. 16.8 billion. "It hasn't come up at the board level," said a high- ranking executive at PKN Orlen. "We have got so many scandals in (the sales) division that the story was simply hidden." (Gazeta Wyborcza, p. 23; w ww.onet.pl) M.M.