English

Criminal case against Teresa Sobol dropped

Police have dropped criminal proceedings against of Teresa Sobol, the ousted manager of the Polish House in the city of Ivyanets, Minsk region, “because of the absence of corpus delicti,” Andrzej Poczobut, chairman of the Main Council of the Warsaw-backed “unofficial” Union of Poles in Belarus (UPB), told BelaPAN.

The proceedings were instituted in December last year over the alleged misappropriation of funds provided by the leadership of the then single UPB in 2004.

In February, the proceedings were dropped by Alyaksandr Shulha, chief of the Valozhyn district police department, because of the expiration of the period of limitations, but the same Shulha later resumed the proceedings and issued a search warrant for Ms. Sobol’s house. The search was conducted on June 28. “According to the warrant, the police looked for ‘tools’ of crime: computers and information carriers, but the search yielded no result, as nothing of the kind was found,” Mr. Poczobut said.

Ms. Sobol denies any wrongdoing and insists that the case was revived to put psychological pressure on her.
According to Ms. Sobol, the charge against her came after she accused local government officials of falsifying the process of nominating delegates to a general conference of the so-called official UPB, that is, the one recognized and backed by the Belarusian government, which took place in Hrodna in September 2009.