EPP's Warsaw meeting will be rescheduled says Polish MEP
A meeting of the European People's Party (EPP) that was to be held in the coming days in Warsaw has been cancelled and will take place at another date, a Polish EPP MEP has told PAP.
In a conversation with PAP, Andrzej Halicki, who is also a member of the Polish centrist Civic Platform-Polish People's Party delegation to the European Parliament, said the meeting was rescheduled at the request of EPP chair Manfred Weber.
"I think that Weber wants to quickly clear up the case of an investigation taking place in Germany into a CDU (German Christian-Democrat party - PAP) politician in Thuringia, who was involved in the election campaign to the European Parliament in 2019," Halicki said. "EPP has the status of a witness or the aggrieved party in the case."
Halicki said that contrary to media reports, the meeting in Warsaw was not planned as a congress or a summit, but a get-together of the EPP leadership.
"In Warsaw, we were planning to discuss security and the future of Ukraine in the EU and Nato," Halicki said, adding that a new date has not yet been determined.
The Belgian police raided the EPP headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday, checking computers and asking for documents related to an ongoing investigation into alleged corruption during the 2019 election campaign to the European Parliament, the Euractiv website reported earlier.
Euractiv said two independent sources have confirmed that "the Polish delegation of the EPP expressed deep concerns about the developments and the political damage to the centre-right family after the raid."
The investigation focuses on Mario Voigt, a CDU lawmaker who was the digital campaign manager for Weber during the 2019 EU election campaign, Euractiv said.
"According to German media reports, the inquiries centre on awarding the contract for the digital campaign to a company in Thuringia, Germany," Euractiv added.
In September last year, Voigt's legal immunity was waved by the Thuringia state parliament's judiciary committee pending investigation by the German public prosecutor, but it is unclear if the case is related.
"The Polish centre-right Civic Platform (PO) party allegedly asked the EPP leadership to cancel the meeting following heavy criticism of pro-government media in Poland, which tried to link PO with the scandal ahead of the general elections," Euractiv said.
According to the website's sources, "PO's leader Donald Tusk already cancelled his participation in the meeting on Wednesday as 'since the raid, media close to PiS have been trying to bring Donald Tusk into the scandal'."
