Poland’s Prime Minister Says He Won’t Dismiss Officials Caught on Leaked Tapes
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Version 0 of 1. WARSAW — Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland said Monday that he would not dismiss any of the ministers whose bluntly political and occasionally profane conversations were caught on tape in the back rooms of expensive Warsaw restaurants, unless they are caught engaging in illegal behavior. Instead, Mr. Tusk said, the government would focus on uncovering the “criminal gang” that had made the illegal recordings, the transcripts of which have appeared in recent issues of a weekly Warsaw newspaper. The newspaper, Wprost, said it did not know who made the tapes over the course of more than a year. In a separate news conference, Poland’s president, Bronislaw Komorowski, said he lacked the authority to replace Mr. Tusk’s government without parliamentary approval, though he was critical of the vulgar language on the tapes. Opposition leaders charged that the two leaders, both members of the governing party, were trying to slip the embarrassing scandal under the rug, and they vowed to push for a vote of “no confidence” in Parliament. “We are dealing with an unprecedented type of political crisis,” Mr. Tusk said. |