By Karol Badohal<\/p>\n
WARSAW, March 5 (Reuters) – Poland’s central bank (NBP) will not propose any alternative to the European Union’s ‘SAFE’ programme for defence financing that lowers its \u200creserves, Governor Adam Glapinski said on Thursday, adding that he believed the bank’s \u200cprofits could be used.<\/p>\n
Warsaw was the biggest beneficiary of the EU’s 150-billion-euro Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative to \u200bboost the continent’s armed forces, but the programme has been hotly debated in Poland as nationalists oppose Brussels getting involved in defence.<\/p>\n
Nationalist opposition party Law and Justice (PiS) says SAFE would saddle Warsaw with debt, limit arms purchases from Warsaw’s most important ally, the U.S., and \u200cthat it comes with conditions that \u2060PiS says are intended to allow German meddling in Polish affairs.<\/p>\n
The government has dismissed these views and says ‘SAFE’ is essential for Polish security \u2060in the face of what it says is a rising threat from Russia.<\/p>\n
However, PiS urged their ally President Karol Nawrocki to veto a bill that would create a mechanism for spending \u200bthe \u200bmoney from the EU loans.<\/p>\n
POLISH ALTERNATIVE<\/p>\n
On Wednesday Glapinski \u200bappeared alongside Nawrocki, who said they \u200chad been discussing a plan to use Polish funds instead of the EU loans.<\/p>\n
However, Nawrocki and Glapinski did not announce specific details of how such a plan would work.<\/p>\n
“We intend to propose actions that will not lead to a depletion of our foreign exchange reserves,” Glapinski told a news conference on Thursday. “We do not seek to deplete our reserves. \u200cWe have accumulated these reserves for a different \u200bpurpose.”<\/p>\n
He said central bank profits could be used and \u200bthat the government and the presidency \u200bshould be the first to know the details.<\/p>\n
He said the NBP \u200cwould act within the limits of its \u200bmandate, but that Poland’s \u200bpresidency was working on draft legislation that would increase the central bank’s ability to support defence spending, without elaborating.<\/p>\n
Leszek Skiba, an adviser to Nawrocki, wrote on X \u200bthat the plan would involve \u200cthe NBP using profits from the increasing value of its gold reserves.<\/p>\n
($1 = \u200b3.6794 zlotys)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Pawel Florkiewicz, Karol Badohal and Marek Strzelecki; Writing by Anna \u200bKoper and Alan CharlishEditing by Gareth Jones)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Karol Badohal WARSAW, March 5 (Reuters) – Poland’s central bank (NBP) will not propose any alternative to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":806047,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5174],"tags":[12810,2000,299,5187,1699,233227,61876,233226,51030,233228,770,233229,38798],"class_list":["post-806046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-eu","tag-central-bank","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-european-union","tag-foreign-exchange-reserves","tag-gold-reserves","tag-governor-adam-glapinski","tag-karol-nawrocki","tag-nbp","tag-poland","tag-polish-affairs","tag-safe"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116177657299405309","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=806046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/806047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=806046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=806046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=806046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}