On a January night, a courier carried a USB stick holding some $60 million in Tether into a Caracas hotel lobby. The money had left Warsaw more than a year earlier, wired by a Swiss trading arm of Poland’s state energy group Orlen to a Dubai broker meant to secure six million barrels of Venezuelan crude. The cargo stayed ashore, and the tanker sailed without it.
Orlen’s government owners now put the vanished advances at $230 million, part of a wider bill closer to $424 million once legal costs and idle freight are added.
Orlen dominates refining across Poland, Lithuania and the Czech Republic, and roughly 40% of its crude has come from Saudi Arabia in recent years, a dependency that looked sound until this month.
Loadings bound for Gdańsk and other European refiners have come to a standstill after a drone strike on the kingdom’s East-West pipeline. Executives at Chevron and its peers warned last week that the buffers built to soften such shocks now sit largely exhausted.
Into that squeeze, Prime Minister Donald Tusk has revived a 60% levy on oil firms’ excess earnings, promising to funnel the proceeds into cheaper pumps for Polish drivers. Orlen alone would carry roughly three-fifths of the tax base.
The measure carries a straightforward fairness, asking companies that gained from the shock to help settle a bill the state has already covered through cuts to VAT and excise duty.
A Fight Between Cabinet And Palace
The levy dates to June, when Tusk’s government first passed it as a reply to the price spike that followed the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. President Karol Nawrocki, an ally of the opposition Law and Justice party, blocked it and sent the bill to the Constitutional Tribunal, which continues to deliberate.
Cabinet approved the bill again this week and urged Nawrocki to sign it this time.
The delay carries its own toll. Relief measures such as reduced VAT and excise duty on petrol lapsed over the summer, and pump prices climbed again almost immediately once they expired. Poland’s finance ministry put the earlier subsidy at roughly $435 million a month, money the treasury wants to recoup through a levy Nawrocki has already blocked once.
The Squeeze Above Poland’s Refineries
Poland’s own exposure sits inside a larger supply crunch that lies largely outside Warsaw’s control. Ukraine’s long campaign against Russian refineries has left Moscow with fewer diesel exports to sell, and President Trump has urged Kyiv’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy to spare those refineries, saying the strikes are worsening a shortage stretching well past the two warring countries.
Zelenskyy’s government treats the refineries as legitimate military targets, and Kyiv has shown every sign of continuing.
Add the Aramco pipeline outage, and Orlen finds itself hunting for North Sea and American crude at a premium, a scramble traders have already described across five separate industry sources. Diesel in the United States has climbed past $6 a gallon for the first time, and Brent crude has traded above $100 a barrel for the first time in over a year.
A Front Line With More Than Prices
Poland’s neighbourhood sees trouble on more fronts than the pumps alone. Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace a year ago, prompting Warsaw to invoke NATO consultations and to build a fortified line along its eastern border.
Sabotage attempts on railways carrying supplies toward Ukraine have followed since, alongside cyberattacks officials in Warsaw link to Moscow’s wider campaign of pressure across the alliance’s eastern flank.
Estonia, a far smaller partner in that same campaign, warned recently that a procurement scandal and mounting state debt were shrinking its own room to keep backing Kyiv without complaint.
Poland is larger and richer than Estonia, and its coalition has shown every sign of continuing to back Kyiv’s defence. A government spending billions on air defence and border works must also absorb the priciest diesel prices in years, a combination that carries a political toll.
A Fair Levy, A Small Shield
A windfall levy worth 4 billion zloty arrives as Orlen’s advance remains tied up in arbitration two years after the Caracas couriers finished their work. The East-West pipeline remains idle, and Kyiv continues to strike refineries it regards as fair military targets.
What the levy can do is modest and honest. It can spread a shock that originated far from Poland across the firms that profited from it, sparing households the full burden of a price rise that arrived from beyond their control. Poland’s drivers may see a few grosze knocked off the pump price if Nawrocki signs the bill, and Orlen’s shareholders will absorb the tax without much complaint given last year’s earnings.
The larger question, how Warsaw keeps funding air defence, refinery diversification and Kyiv’s cause at once, will find its answer elsewhere than a tax on last year’s profit. Drivers filling up in the coming months will notice the difference regardless of what Nawrocki decides.
Keep up with Daily Euro Times for more updates
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