CELIS Country Note on Poland, 2023

by Maria Kalinowska and Marek Jaśkowski

Date of Publication: 14 August 2023

The Note contains basic information on the political background of FDI screening in Poland, the Polish FDI screening mechanism and framework, including protected entities, grounds for issuing objection against a planned investment, and the procedure. A noteworthy feature of the mechanism is that during the COVID-19 pandemic a parallel extraordinary mechanism has been established, besides the ordinary one. The new mechanism has a much wider scope of application and is supposed to be of temporary nature. Nevertheless, the period of its application has already been extended to 60 months (in place of originally intended 24 months) and the reasons for its preservation have been supplemented to include (besides the COVID-19 pandemic) also “the international situation distorting the market or the competition”. In both models, planned transactions can be carried out if the responsible authority does not issue an objection, the reasons for which are specified by law.