Secret recording has Polish PM slamming ‘greedy’ Jewish, other hedge fund owners

Poland’s prime minister was heard making allegedly anti-Semitic remarks in secret recordings from 2013, before he rose to power.

The recordings of Mateusz Morawiecki complaining to friends about “greedy” and rich “Americans, Jews, Germans, Englishmen, and Swiss” that run hedge funds are published today by the news site Onet.

Part of a corruption scandal, the remarks appear in a 3-hour recording of Morawiecki, who was then a senior banker, discussing politics and finance with his friends at a prestigious Warsaw restaurant.

That conversation was part of a series of tapes that hammered the popularity of the then Civic-Platform led government and helped drive it from power in 2015, when it was replaced by Morawiecki’s right-wing Law and Justice party.

But now, the content of the Morawiecki tape is coming back to haunt him ahead of a trip to the United States on one of his government’s most sensitive foreign-policy issues – its relationship with Jews and Israel.

In February, Morawiecki, who does not have a history of public statement about Jews, came under attack for speaking about Jewish collaborators with the Nazis in the Holocaust, equating them with the actions of Poles who collaborated with the Nazis.

— JTA