Since its celebrated Warsaw Stock Exchange IPO in October 2013, PKP Cargo has had seven different people serve as president or acting president of the management board. Not one completed a full term without political controversy, a forced dismissal, a share trading scandal, or a criminal investigation. This is the complete record.
The story of PKP Cargo since its celebrated Warsaw Stock Exchange debut in October 2013 is, among many other things, a story about what happens when a publicly listed company's management appointments are treated as political rewards rather than commercial decisions for long enough. In the thirteen years since the IPO, the company has burned through seven different presidents or acting presidents of the management board. Market share has fallen from 48.6% to 27.9%. The company entered formal restructuring proceedings in July 2024. It posted a EUR 562 million net loss in 2024 and returned to a thin EUR 9.1 million net profit in 2025. It is currently suing the Polish state for PLN 1.52 billion in damages. The chairman of every government that ran Poland since 2013 bears some share of responsibility for what happened, though the degrees vary considerably. What follows is the complete record of each person who led the company, why they left, and what the current management plan says about what comes next.
Libiszewski was the president who oversaw the IPO itself in October 2013 and the first months of trading, during which the share price climbed from PLN 68 to its all-time high of PLN 94.74 in February 2014. He was a railway sector veteran rather than a political appointee in the crude sense. The IPO was well-executed and the initial investor relations were strong. His departure in early 2014 was unremarkable by the standards of what would follow, and represents the last moment of relative normalcy in the company's post-IPO governance story.
Purwin was chosen through a competitive selection process and brought genuine financial credentials, having worked at Bank Polska Kasa Opieki, PKO BP, and Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego before joining PKP as managing director for privatisation and helping prepare PKP Cargo's IPO as CFO from February 2013. He was by background a banker and M&A specialist rather than a logistics operator. He resigned on 14 December 2015, citing important personal reasons. The resignation came during a period of political transition in Poland: the Law and Justice party won the parliamentary elections in October 2015, and the change of government brought a wave of management replacements across state-controlled companies. The timing of Purwin's departure was characteristic of that wave. He was replaced by a Supervisory Board nomination rather than another open competitive process, which set the template for the political appointment culture that defined the following decade.
Libiszewski returned to the president's role after Purwin's departure. His second term was unremarkable in the sense that it produced no particular scandal, but it also produced no particular commercial progress. The company's market share continued eroding through this period as private operators and DB Cargo Polska took advantage of PKP Cargo's commercial passivity on intermodal routes. The coal wagon fleet continued to grow as a share of the total fleet during this period, locking in the structural problem that would eventually produce the 2024 crisis. Libiszewski's tenure is best understood as a period of managed stasis: the company was not being actively looted or visibly mismanaged, but it was not being built either. Revenue grew at a fraction of the rate of the Polish economy while the competitive landscape shifted against it. This is the governance failure of omission rather than commission, which is harder to assign blame for and easier to ignore until it is too late.
Warsewicz was a Law and Justice era appointment, installed by the Supervisory Board during the period when the ruling party was placing loyalists across the state enterprise sector. His background was in the railway sector and he had a close relationship with the PKP Group political network. Under his tenure the company executed the largest single commercial mistake of its post-IPO history: the continued investment in coal wagon capacity as coal volumes were already in structural decline. The fleet composition shifted further toward coal during this period, creating the 75%-coal-wagon fleet that the 2024 write-downs eventually acknowledged. Warsewicz was also president when the July 2022 coal decision was issued by the Morawiecki government, an order he was in no position to resist given his political appointment background. He was among the management figures replaced following the change of government in late 2023. His departure, along with that of Marcin Wojewódka as acting president, marked the formal end of the Law and Justice management era at PKP Cargo.
Wojewódka served as acting president during the turbulent transition period following the October 2023 election that brought Donald Tusk's Civic Coalition to power. He is a qualified restructuring advisor and legal counsel with genuine credentials in that field, and his appointment reflected the new government's recognition that the company needed restructuring expertise rather than political loyalty at the top. He filed the restructuring application with the court and initiated the process that would eventually produce PKP Cargo's rehabilitation plan. His departure in December 2024, and then again from the Supervisory Board where he returned as vice-chairman, was shadowed by a significant controversy. On 11 December 2024, Wojewódka, then vice-chairman of the Supervisory Board, sold 91,000 PKP Cargo shares. PKP SA then dismissed him from the Supervisory Board. The timing of the share sale, immediately before his dismissal and before significant negative corporate communications in December 2024, attracted scrutiny from market participants and financial press, who questioned whether the transaction constituted trading on the basis of non-public information. No formal regulatory action had been publicly confirmed as of the date of this article, but the sequence of the sale, the dismissal, and the subsequent negative corporate announcements created a reputational cloud that has not been fully dispelled.
Wasilewska-Semail was the most credentialed external appointment in PKP Cargo's post-IPO history. A Belgian-trained lawyer with an LLM from KU Leuven, eighteen years in senior banking roles at ING, PKO BP, and Citigroup, and direct experience leading Rafako, the Polish power engineering company, through restructuring as its president from 2014 to 2021, she was selected through a genuine competitive process in December 2024. She was the right person for the job and everyone who covered the appointment said so at the time. Under her leadership, the company filed its restructuring plan with the court, submitted the PLN 1.52 billion compensation claim against the state over the coal decision, returned to quarterly profitability in Q2 and Q3 of 2025, and cut operating costs enough to generate a positive full-year 2025 result. She was dismissed by the Supervisory Board on 22 December 2025, less than eleven months into her tenure, with no reasons given. The dismissal came one day after the company filed its lawsuit against the Polish state for PLN 1.52 billion in damages. Industry observers immediately noted the sequence. The new government's Ministry of State Assets declined to pay the compensation claim that the state was legally required to pay under Poland's crisis management law of 2007. The CEO who filed the lawsuit against the government was gone within twenty-four hours of it being lodged. Wasilewska-Semail has since taken a director role at PreZero Polska. She was forty-nine months old at the time of her dismissal and had spent eleven months turning a company around.
Starecka was a Supervisory Board member delegated to serve as acting president for a maximum of ninety days following Wasilewska-Semail's dismissal. She had a strong background: EY Poland board member and operations director from 2014 to 2018, CFO of Grupy Smyk from 2010 to 2014, CFO of Vattenfall Heat Poland before that. She had also been acting president briefly at Enea, the energy company, in early 2024. Her role was caretaker: to maintain stability while a new president was selected through the required competitive process. She served for forty-one days.
Prus was appointed president from 2 February 2026 following a competitive selection process. He brings thirty years of experience in the railway sector, having spent his entire career in PKP Group companies: director of the Transport Management Office from 2017 to 2021, member of the Management Board for Operations at PKP Cargo Service from 2021 to 2024, president of PKP Cargo International in 2024, and president of PKP Cargo Service alongside his role as management board representative for operations at PKP Cargo under restructuring. He is, in the most precise sense available, a railway lifer and a PKP Group insider. PKP SA president Alan Beroud described the appointment as reflecting the need for "a leader who combines high managerial competence with deep practical knowledge of the company, the Group, and the market." That description is accurate. It is also a description that could have been applied to every politically appointed PKP Cargo president since 2016: deep knowledge of the company is not the same thing as the external commercial ambition and independence from the state ownership structure that the company arguably needs most. The restructuring plan targets PLN 1.3 billion in EBITDA by 2031. Prus now owns the responsibility for delivering it.
On 23 December 2025, PKP Cargo filed a claim at the Warsaw District Court against the Polish State Treasury, specifically the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of State Assets, demanding PLN 1,522.42 million in compensation. The legal basis is the Coal Decision issued by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on 25 July 2022, modified by a further decision on 6 October 2022.
The context is important. In July 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the European embargo on Russian coal, the Morawiecki government faced a potential energy crisis before the winter heating season. Poland had banned Russian coal imports and needed to source approximately 12.5 million tonnes from alternative suppliers including Colombia, Indonesia, Australia, and South Africa. 242 ships delivered the coal to Baltic ports. 3,300 trains then moved it from the ports inland.
The government issued a formal prime ministerial decision under Poland's Crisis Management Act of 2007 ordering PKP Cargo to prioritise the transport of the imported coal, purchased by state energy companies PGE Paliwa and Weglokoks, over its existing commercial contracts. PKP Cargo was legally obligated to comply. Under the Crisis Management Act, the state was simultaneously obligated to enter into a formal agreement with PKP Cargo covering the financing of that task. The state never signed that agreement and never paid. PKP Cargo, forced to abandon its most profitable commercial contracts to redirect its fleet to the coal operation, lost key customer relationships that went to competitors and never returned. The company argues, with considerable documentary support, that the coal decision and the state's failure to pay for it was a direct and material cause of the financial crisis that followed in 2024.
There is a further dimension. PKP Cargo separately filed a criminal complaint alleging suspicion of a crime against Jacek Sasin, the former Minister of State Assets in the Morawiecki government who oversaw the state companies involved in the coal import operation. That complaint is in a separate legal track from the civil damages claim. Whether it proceeds to prosecution is a matter for Polish prosecutors and courts, not PKP Cargo's management.
PKP Cargo submitted its Restructuring Plan and creditor settlement proposals to the court in late June 2025, under the sanacja rehabilitation proceedings opened by a Warsaw court in July 2024. The plan was then reviewed by the Creditors Council, which requested extensions to its review deadline before eventually providing its assessment in early 2026. The plan contains four main elements.
First, a debt repayment model for the nearly PLN 3 billion in debt, which requires renegotiation with financial creditors under court supervision. The plan proposes a phased repayment schedule that extends the maturity of the debt obligations while the company rebuilds its earnings capacity.
Second, operational efficiency initiatives including reorganisation and automation of operational processes, maintenance of cost discipline, and the job reduction programme which had already cut 3,665 positions in 2024, a further 450 in 2025, and planned further reductions of up to 1,041 in 2025 and 1,388 in 2026.
Third, development initiatives focused on revenue growth through new commercial relationships, fleet diversification away from coal toward intermodal and mixed-use wagons, and expansion of the company's nine EU country licence network.
Fourth, the financial target: if the planned actions are successfully implemented, PKP Cargo projects EBITDA of approximately PLN 1.296 billion by 2031. That is a genuinely ambitious target from a company that generated EUR 40 million in Group EBIT in 2025. The trajectory requires sustained revenue growth from the intermodal and diversified freight segments as coal volumes continue declining, alongside continued cost discipline and successful debt renegotiation. Each of those conditions has dependencies: the intermodal revenue growth depends on commercial execution that the company has consistently underperformed for a decade; the debt renegotiation depends on creditor agreement under court supervision; and the coal volume replacement depends on a macroeconomic and logistics environment that is favourable but not guaranteed.
As of July 2026, PKP Cargo is operating under formal restructuring proceedings with Zbigniew Prus as president, a Supervisory Board reconstituted in its 9th term as of 23 June 2026, and a restructuring plan that requires creditor agreement and court approval to take full effect. The most recent quarterly earnings date was 28 August 2026, when Q1 2026 results were due. The PLN 1.52 billion lawsuit against the state is active at the Warsaw District Court. The criminal complaint against former minister Sasin is in the hands of prosecutors.
| Item | Status as of July 2026 |
|---|---|
| Current President | Zbigniew Prus, in post since 2 February 2026 |
| Restructuring proceedings | Active, sanacja rehabilitation under court supervision since July 2024 |
| Most recent full-year result | EUR 9.1M net profit, 2025 (reported April 2026) |
| Group EBIT 2025 | EUR 40.0M |
| Debt load | Approximately PLN 2.85 billion |
| Annual interest expense | Approximately PLN 142 million |
| EBITDA target 2031 | PLN 1.296 billion under the restructuring plan |
| State lawsuit | PLN 1.52 billion claim filed at Warsaw District Court, December 2025 |
| Criminal complaint | Filed against former minister Jacek Sasin, status with prosecutors |
| Share price | Approximately PLN 11, versus IPO price of PLN 68 and ATH of PLN 94.74 |
| Forward P/E | Approximately 5x vs 13x European transport sector average |
| Q1 2026 results | Due August 2026 |
The pattern across thirteen years is consistent enough to describe as a system rather than a series of accidents. State-controlled company. Political appointments. Management optimised for government relations rather than commercial performance. Commercial decisions distorted by political priorities, most catastrophically in the 2022 coal operation. Periodic replacement of management when political winds shift, with no continuity of commercial strategy between tenures. The result: market share nearly halved, a EUR 562 million loss year, formal restructuring proceedings, and a company suing the government that is simultaneously its largest shareholder.
The dismissal of Wasilewska-Semail, the most genuinely qualified external president the company had appointed since its IPO, on the day after she filed a PLN 1.52 billion lawsuit against the state, is not a complicated story to read. Whether it represents the current government reasserting political control over the restructuring process, or something more mundane related to internal management board disagreements, the market read it clearly: it is the kind of governance event that makes institutional investors with a fiduciary duty hesitate. Prus may be exactly the right person for the operational execution phase of the restructuring. His railway knowledge is genuine and his track record within PKP Cargo Service is positive. But the question an independent investor will inevitably ask is whether the company is now being steered primarily for shareholder value or primarily for state infrastructure management convenience, and the Wasilewska-Semail dismissal does not make that question easier to answer.
PKP Cargo cannot go bankrupt. Its infrastructure is irreplaceable. Its strategic position at the EU-Middle Corridor intersection is genuinely unique. At PLN 11 and a forward P/E of 5x, the valuation appears to discount a company still in crisis rather than one that just returned to profitability in its most recent annual report. The PLN 1.3 billion EBITDA target by 2031 is ambitious but not impossible if the commercial execution and debt restructuring both go according to plan. Whether this management team, appointed by this shareholder, in this governance environment, can deliver that execution is the only question that matters now.
This article is produced by Fides Polonia Capital Management for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. PKP Cargo S.A. (WSE: PKP) is a publicly listed company. Fides Polonia Capital Management may hold or consider holding positions in PKP Cargo S.A. or related securities. All assertions regarding PKP Cargo governance events, legal proceedings, and financial results are sourced from publicly available Polish and international financial press and company regulatory filings as cited. Nothing in this article should be construed as legal or financial advice. Always conduct independent due diligence before making any investment decision.