The Warsaw District Court has sentenced Bogusław B., already convicted before for the Art-B affair, to 6 years in prison for fraud with the use of a pyramid scheme. The verdict is not yet legally binding.

"It wasn't a real business, it was all about defrauding money," judge Izabela Ledzion said in the verdict justification.

The court also imposed a 100.000-zloty fine on the defendant and ordered him to fix the damages caused with his crime by returning the money stolen from the victims". The other defendant in the case, Maciej G., was sentenced for 2 years in prison in suspension for 5 years and a fine of 20.000 zlotys.

According to the court, Bogusław B. "currently resides abroad, as email exchange seems to suggest".

The trial before the Warsaw District Court began over 2 years ago - in early September, 2017. The District Court proceeded the case for the second time. In January, 2017, the Court of Appeal in Warsaw overruled the verdict of the court of first instance from Novemebr, 2015. Back then, Bogusław B. was sentenced for 5 years in prison and Maciej G. - for a year in suspension. When overruling that verdict, the Court of Appeals argued that the District Court had wrongly assessed the damages suffered by the victims.

According to the prosecution, between 2005 and 2007, the defendants defrauded around 170 people, who had invested a total of 33.5 million zlotys. Investigation in this case was launched in 2007, after the Financial Supervision Authority had been notified. The inquiry showed that Bogusław B. was working on behalf of a company based in Britain, whereas Maciej G. was the chairman of another firm. They were accused of misleading the investors by entering into agreements with them, through a network of middlemen. According to the contracts, the duo were supposed to manage the capital invested by their clients and receive interest in return.

"In reality they created a mere illusion of a professional investment business. Instead of guaranteed 1-percent profit per week, that is 52 percent per annum, with money-back guarantee, they created a system used only to defraud the money in the form of a so-called pyramid scheme," the prosecutor's office informed.

The Art-B affair, for which Bogusław B. had been convicted before, was the top high-profile scandal of the early III Polish Republic (after the fall of communism in 1989). Bogusław B., together with his associate, Andrzej Gąsiorowski, who had allowed his name to be used in full, were said to have make 4.2 trillion of the then zlotys (in 1995, after years of high inflation, Poland dropped four zeroes from its national currency) with the use of a so-called oscillator. In 1991, they both fled from Poland to Israel. Bogusław B. was detained in 1994 in Switzerland, handed over to Poland and sentenced for 9 years in prison in 2000. The time he had spent in remand was taken into account. In left the prison in mid-2004.

Autor: gf / Źródło: TVN24 News in English, PAP