The Rywin affair (Polish: afera Rywina) was a corruption scandal in Poland, which began in late 2002 while the post-communist government of the SLD (Democratic Left Alliance) was in power.
Rywin sought a bribe of 17.5 million USD to arrange a change to a draft law aimed at limiting the print media's influence on radio and television, which would have been in Michnik's favour; the original draft would have prevented the paper's publishing house, Agora S.A. from taking over the private TV station Polsat or the second channel of Poland's public TV broadcaster Telewizja Polska.
Rywin said he was acting on behalf of what he called a "group in power" which wanted to remain anonymous but possibly included then prime minister Leszek Miller of the post-communist Alliance of the Democratic Left.
[citation needed] Only after Gazeta Wyborcza's investigations had remained inconclusive, on 27 December 2002 – six months after the incident, which cast some doubts on the real role of the newspaper in the affair – the paper printed the partial record of Michnik's conversation with Rywin, igniting the scandal.
[2] However, other papers had reported parts of the story earlier (e.g. weekly magazine Wprost[3]) In January 2003, the Polish parliament (Sejm) created a special committee to conduct an investigation into the circumstances of the affair.