The Gdańsk-based shipyard had been suspected of paying a bribe of over €1 million to former Port of Tallinn management board member Allan Kiil, and was also under suspicion as part of a long-running bribery scheme involving Port of Tallinn executives.

In 2014, a subsidiary of the Port of Tallinn signed contracts with Remontowa for the construction of two ferries. The vessels Piret and Tõll, which travel between mainland Estonia and Muhu, cost a total of €63 million.

According to the prosecution, Remontowa's commercial director Jan Paszkowski and businessman Toivo Promm signed a sham brokerage agreement in 2014 under which the shipyard was to pay €1.26 million, equivalent to 2 percent of the vessel cost, the newspaper reported.

Investigators believe this money was intended as a bribe for Kiil, who at the time was a member of the Reform Party, while Promm was a member of Isamaa.

The trial of Kiil, Promm, Paszkowski, and others began in Harju County Court in 2017. Initially, the prosecution planned to bring charges against Remontowa as a legal entity as well. However, that plan had to be abandoned because it would have required the legal representative of the shipyard to be questioned, and this questioning could not be carried out.

"The actions of the Polish company now fall outside the statute of limitations," Prosecutor Teeli Mägi from the Office of the Prosecutor General told Eesti Ekspress.

In the same criminal case, Harju County Court ended proceedings against Allan Kiil in 2020 due to his terminal illness. This summer, the Tallinn Circuit Court acquitted the remaining Port of Tallinn defendants of private sector bribery and money laundering charges. The prosecution challenged the acquittal in the Supreme Court, which has yet to decide whether to take the case up for review.

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