Poland’s ruling party announces makeup of new right-wing Cabinet under Prime

Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki, the current chief executive at bank BZ WBK, will become the country’s new minister responsible for economic policy, election victor Law and Justice (PiS) party said on Monday.

Szydlo named Witold Waszczykowski, a former deputy foreign minister, as his foreign minister.

The most controversial appointment to the government is that of Antoni Macierwicz, who is to be the new defense minister.

He served as Poland’s ambassador to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in Brussels from 1997 to 1999, when it was among the first ex-communist countries to join the Western defence alliance.

Macierewicz is a polarizing figure in Poland for his theory that the plane crash in Russian Federation in 2010 that killed President Lech Kaczynski and dozens of other state officials was an assassination, not an accident.

Without offering decisive proof, he accused Moscow of instigating an attack on Kaczynski’s jet in collusion with Poland’s then prime minister Donald Tusk, now the European Union president.

Even though investigators in Moscow and Warsaw concluded that pilot error was to blame for the Smolensk crash, Kaczynski – the late president’s twin brother – has also insisted the crash was not an accident.

Mariusz Kaminski, a former head of the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau, was nominated as the coordinator of special services, whose job is to oversee police and intelligence agencies.

The party called earlier on Monday a news conference for 1230 GMT (0730 ET) to be attended by PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and the party’s candidate for prime minister Beata Szydlo. PiS, which won outright parliamentary majority in last month’s elections, has said it would announce the names of its ministers this week. Kaminski was convicted of abusing his power in 2007 as head of the anti-corruption body and was slapped recently with a three-year suspended sentence.