Daniel Obajtek

Activity in state-owned companies

On November 27, 2015, Daniel Obajtek was entrusted with the duties of the president of the Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture, and on January 13, 2016, he was appointed to this position. In July 2016, he was appointed as the chairman of the supervisory board of Lotos Biopaliwa Sp. z o.o. At the same time, he served as the chairman of the supervisory board of the state-owned company Dalmor S.A. On March 2, 2017, he was appointed as the president of the management board of the energy group Energa S.A. On February 5, 2018, he was appointed as the president of the management board of Orlen company (he took office on February 6, 2018), replacing Wojciech Jasiński. In February 2024, he was dismissed from the position of Orlen's president (he ended his term on February 5, 2024). Since 2018, he has served as the chairman of the council of the Polish Olympic Committee. In the same year, he became a member of the program council of the Economic Forum in Krynica.

Obajtek tapes

On February 26, 2021, the daily newspaper "Gazeta Wyborcza" revealed recordings containing telephone conversations of Obajtek from 2009, i.e., from the time he held the office of mayor of Pcim commune. The extensive material contained the content of hours-long telephone conversations between Obajtek and his business partners, which were supposed to prove that he had made false depositions regarding the division of his functions as mayor and managing the TT Plast company. In the following days, "Gazeta Wyborcza" published an article presenting Obajtek's family and social connections with several people, including Zofia Paryła, who became the president of the oil company Grupa Lotos in 2020; Obajtek and Paryła worked together at the Elektroplast company in Stróża.

The publications concerning Obajtek sparked a series of comments in public and media debates. Civic Coalition MPs submitted a request to the prosecutor's office regarding Obajtek's assets, and to the Supreme Audit Office they directed a request to investigate the subsidies that companies associated with Obajtek allegedly obtained from public funds. The Left MPs demanded that the Minister of Justice and Prosecutor General Zbigniew Ziobro initiate ex officio proceedings against Daniel Obajtek, and in order to investigate potential irregularities related to Obajtek's assets and financial activities, they submitted a request to the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau. They also appealed to Obajtek to disclose his own asset declarations. Politicians from the ruling PiS camp spoke in defense of Daniel Obajtek as well as the spokesman for President Andrzej Duda. The information contained in Gazeta Wyborcza's publications was denied by PKN Orlen, as the published content concerned, among other things, alleged property connections between PKN Orlen, Prowbud company, and Daniel Obajtek, which according to PKN Orlen was untrue and put in a bad light the Company's activity of supporting athletes, which is one of the most important elements of the Company's CSR. The reports of Gazeta Wyborcza were also denied by Prowbud company and the Football Academy Beniaminek Krosno, which were also slandered in Wyborcza's article.

In a segment of Wiadomości on TVP, the vulgarities and insults used by Obajtek in the recorded conversations were justified by Tourette syndrome, which Daniel Obajtek allegedly suffered from. In response, the Board of the Polish Tourette Syndrome Association issued a statement critical of the TVP material, stating: "we do not agree to the use and manipulation of the image of people suffering from Tourettes".

In March 2021, in response to a series of articles suggesting illegal origins of his assets and unclear business dealings, Daniel Obajtek decided to disclose his financial documents for the years 1998-2020 and make them available for inspection by interested journalists.

On June 8, 2021, the court in Warsaw fully dismissed Obajtek's demands for Gazeta Wyborcza to cease publishing information about his multi-million assets and informal arrangements with developers sponsored by PKN Orlen. The court found that public interest and press freedom are arguments for disclosing such information. In February 2022, the Court of Appeal in Warsaw dismissed with final effect Daniel Obajtek's lawsuit for the publication of a correction to the article "Obajtek's Tapes...".

2024 recordings

In March 2024, Onet reported that it had a recording from a wiretap that the CBA had placed on the then-president of Orlen. The tape contained a conversation between Obajtek and investigative journalist Piotr Nisztor, who is seen asking the president for a job for his wife and father, revealing he has blackmail material on PiS regarding the GetBack scandal. Commenting on these reports, Nisztor stated that he had heard that his conversations with Obajtek might have been recorded, but he does not know whether the recordings are credible or manipulated. For his part, Obajtek, in a post on Twitter, claimed that both recording him and passing on these recordings is 'pathological' and announced that he would file a complaint with the prosecutor's office regarding the ordeal.

Onet previously released a transcript of a phone conversation between Obajtek and Adam Burak, a former Orlen executive board member. The call was intercepted by the CBA between 2020 and 2021. According to Onet, Obajtek, then President of the Management Board of Orlen, exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to create internal conflict within PiS and enhance his own image. Despite Poland's shortage of medical supplies, Orlen reportedly distributed over 3 million zlotys worth of disinfectants, masks, and hazmat suits to the Vatican City to achieve this goal.

On 7 October 2025, the European Parliament lifted Obajtek's parliamentary immunity to allow investigations against him in Poland to proceed.