Huge property damage. The airport in Radom is under the microscope of the prosecutor's office

The Regional Prosecutor's Office in Lublin initiated an investigation into the construction of the airport in Radom. Prosecutors will investigate whether the decisions to implement this investment – despite evidence indicating its unprofitability – resulted in property damage of over PLN 800 million.

Property damage in PPL

– The investigation was initiated by a notification from the injured company, which indicated that the expenditure of funds for the expansion of the airport in Radom took place without economic justification, despite a number of indications that it was unprofitable and based on unrealistic and theoretical assumptions – said Beata Syk-Jankowska, spokeswoman for the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Lublin, in a press release on Friday.

The initiated investigation concerns irregularities in the implementation of the Warsaw-Radom Airport investment in the period from 2017 to 2023. Syk-Jankowska stated that the proceedings concerned crimes abuse of granted powers and failure to fulfill obligations by persons obliged at Polish Airports (PPL) to deal with the company's property matters.

The prosecutor's office is checking whether the decisions made by the company's authorities to implement the investment in the Warsaw-Radom Airport and its continuation without economic justification, despite a number of premises indicating its unprofitabilitycaused property damage to PPL in the amount of at least PLN 812.5 million.

An investigation is underway into the case. No one has been charged so far.

In October, PPL submitted a notification on the suspicion of committing a crime in connection with the investment in the airport in Radom to the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw. The case was transferred to the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Lublin.

The spokesman for the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw, prosecutor Mateusz Martyniuk, informed then that the notification concerns suspicion of committing crimes by two former presidents companies whose decisions to build the airport and then to continue it were to cause damage to the company's assets for a total amount of over PLN 860 million. Martyniuk said that the notification also concerns an official crime that allegedly occurred at the Ministry of Infrastructure, which supervised the PPL company and imposed the obligation to implement this investment.

PPL comments: there were economic reasons

The PLL press office, in a statement sent to PAP at the time, pointed out that the port in Radom is a “modern and valuable infrastructure”, so the problem is not the quality of the facility, but the fact that “the decision to build it and its scale was made on very poor economic grounds.”

Former president of PPL in the years 2016-2020, Mariusz Szpikowski, referring to the submitted notification in a letter sent to PAP in October, informed that the plenipotentiary for the Central Communication Port (CPK) tasked PPL with investments aimed at adapting the airport in Radom to the needs of civilian use. As he emphasized, the company's authorities had no right to question this, and PPL “was not an entity entitled in any way to question or demand justification of decisions made at the level of ministries.”

Szpikowski recalled that the airport in Radom was intended to be a complementary airport, dedicated to handling charter and low-cost traffic.

In his opinion, the problems of the Radom airport result from the potential failure of the CPK concept as an important hub in the region. “There is no traffic at the Radom airport not due to faulty analyses, but – apart from the aspect of the pandemic and its impact on aviation, which was impossible to predict – due to the fact that the managers' omissions from 2021 to the present have already resulted in the development of low-cost and charter traffic at the Chopin airport in Warsaw, contrary to the CPK concept,” Szpikowski said.

The airport in Radom began operations in May 2014. For a short time, flights from this city operated, among others, to Riga and Berlin. The city invested PLN 100 million in its creation. After the court announced the bankruptcy of the municipal company Port Lotniczy Radom in 2018, the airport was bought by PPL for PLN 12.7 million in October 2018.

In 2019, the reconstruction of the Radom airport began and was completed in 2023. In April 2023, the airport was officially opened.

In November this year approx. 3.7 thousand people used the services of the Warsaw-Radom airport. passengers. In total, since the beginning of 2025, the airport has processed over 92.4 thousand passengers. travelers (PAP)

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