Polish waiters, businessman sentenced in restaurant wiretaps
WARSAW- A Polish court handed a prison sentence Thursday to a businessman convicted in the illegal wiretapping of top Polish politicians in expensive Warsaw restaurants.
The court sentenced Marek Falenta, the businessman convicted of masterminding the wiretapping, to 2½ years in prison and gave suspended sentences to two waiters who secretly recorded the leaders' private conversations. A third waiter was ordered to pay 50,000 zlotys ($12,000) to charity.
The release of the restaurant recordings sparked a political scandal in 2014 that contributed to the loss of power last year of Civic Platform, the centrist party that had governed Poland for eight years.
The recordings caught top members of the government of former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, now the head of the European Council, using crude language and making rough assessments of foreign allies. The scandal led to the resignation of several senior officials, including Radek Sikorski, a former foreign minister and speaker of the Poland Parliament.
