By: Sara Kovač / Nova24tv.si
Polish American investigative journalist and economist Matthew Tyrmand visited Bovec with former Prime Minister Janez Janša, emphasising that the company of a Slovenian dissident and such a great man, or a real hero, is an extraordinary privilege. He also expressed his belief that the current leader of the opposition will certainly soon be at the head of Slovenia again, especially considering how crazy Slovenian leftists are.
Matthew Tyrmand is the son of the well-known Polish novelist, writer, editor, and anti-communist dissident Leopold Tyrmand, who emigrated from Poland to the USA in 1966 – he was then the editor of the anti-communist monthly Chronicles of Culture with John A. Howard. Among other things, he wrote the book “Diary 1954”, and shortly after he lost his job at the magazine for refusing to publish the official version of Joseph Stalin’s obituary, as dictated by the Polish communist authorities. Tyrmand and his colleagues were then “unofficially” banned from working in print media.
After graduating in 2003, Matthew spent his 20s on Wall Street as a hedge fund portfolio manager, analysing and trading stocks and derivatives in the healthcare and telecommunications sectors. In 2011, he left Wall Street to start his own consulting firm to help small and medium-sized companies grow their businesses, and in 2013 he joined a new organisation called American Transparency, with the mission of publishing all government spending online in a single repository called OpenTheBooks.com.
Since joining founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski, Matthew Tyrmand’s roles have included public relations, media engagement, strategy, litigation analysis, development, coalition building and many other ad hoc responsibilities. He is active in the Polish civil debate and as a private equity investor in Central/Eastern Europe. His criticism of corruption in the Polish government and the nationalisation of the private pension system gained a lot of attention in the domestic press. He joined the Project Veritas (PV) Board of Directors in mid-2014 after working with PV founder James O’Keefe as a consultant and providing contextualised consumption data to Project Veritas research. PV reveals cases of corruption and unfair practices in public life, journalistic texts are often published on the “Breitbart” portal.