State-controlled Polish refiner PKN Orlen bought leading publisher of local media Polska Press from Germany’s Verlagsgruppe Passau Capital Group, the Warsaw-listed company said on December 7.

The transaction will give Orlen new ways of winning new customers, based on the utilisation of big data, the company said in a press release. But taking over Polska Press – which owns 20 out of 24 regional newspapers and news websites with 17.4mn users each month – has stoked fears of a government-inspired encroachment on the independence of the media in Poland.

Apart from offering Orlen data on potential customers’ behaviour that could translate into better sales of the company’s products and services, the same data could be used for targeting users of local media with political messaging.

“The publisher of 20 regional dailies, 120 weeklies and 500 portals is now [the ruling party] Law and Justice,” liberal member of the European Parliament Magdalena Adamowicz said on Twitter.

"A state-owned fuels company buying independent media – that is a scenario of the putinisation of public life in Poland. There is no democracy without free media," Jan Grabiec, the spokesman of Poland's biggest opposition party, Civic Platform, tweeted.

There are local elections in Poland in 2022 and a general election in 2023.

Since winning power for the first time in 2015, the nationalist coalition government, led by Law and Justice (PiS), has transformed public media – broadcaster TVP in particular – into propaganda tools.

PiS has also long talked about foreign media groups having too much influence in Poland and hinted at changing laws to reduce foreign media ownership. The German owners of Polska Press would regularly come up in PiS’s discussions of the matter.

Apart from owning 20 regional newspapers, Polska Press also owns 120 weeklies across Poland and 500 websites.

Verlagsgruppe Passau said in a statement that the sale of the Polish media portfolio was necessary to reorganise the company’s “strategic focus”.