Warsaw exchange adds KredoBank chief Jakub Karnowski to supervisory board
An extraordinary meeting on 10 September took the board to seven; the exchange's own table shows the State Treasury with 51.80 per cent of the votes.
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The Warsaw Stock Exchange (GPW) appointed Jakub Karnowski to its Exchange Supervisory Board at an extraordinary general meeting on 10 September 2026, bringing the board to seven members, the exchange's 10 September release said.
The appointment is for the current term of office. The release does not say whom he replaces, if anyone, and gives no vote count for the resolution. Since the meeting, the exchange has moved all its trading to its in-house GPW WATS system, on 5 October, the session summary shows, and its governing bodies page, checked on 17 October, still lists seven supervisory board members.
Karnowski has been chief executive of KredoBank, a Ukrainian lender, since 1 March 2025, after serving as its first deputy chairman from August 2024, the release said. The exchange's governing bodies page lists him as a member who meets the independence criteria in paragraph 14(1) of its articles of association and places him on two of the board's four committees, audit and strategy.
The appointment puts a director with audit committee experience at three Polish financial groups on the board of an exchange whose controlling shareholder is the state. On GPW's own shareholder table, dated 31 December 2023, the State Treasury held 14,695,470 series A preferred shares, or 35.01 per cent of the capital. Because each of those shares carries two votes at the general meeting, the Treasury's stake translated into 29,390,940 votes, or 51.80 per cent of voting rights, out of 56,744,470 in total.
What the release says about him
Before moving into Ukrainian banking, Karnowski chaired audit and risk committees and served as an independent supervisory board member at HSBC Bank Polska from 2015 to 2019, at Allianz Polska from 2017 to 2024 and at PZU from 2014 to 2016, the release said. In Ukraine he sat on the supervisory board of the postal operator Ukrposhta from 2018 to 2024, chairing it from 2021, and was an independent member of the supervisory board of the railway operator Ukrzaliznytsia from 2021 to 2024.
His earlier roles, as listed by the exchange, include head of the political cabinet of then finance minister Leszek Balcerowicz from 1997 to 2000, posts at Narodowy Bank Polski including adviser on euro adoption, and alternate executive director at the World Bank from 2003 to 2008. He was president of the management board of the asset manager PKO TFI from 2008 to 2012 and of the railway holding PKP S.A. from 2012 to 2015, and chief executive of Luma Investment from 2016 to 2019. He holds a master's degree and a PhD in economics from the Warsaw School of Economics, an MBA from the University of Minnesota and the CFA designation, and sits on the World Bank's Ukraine Expert Panel, the release said.
The board he joins
The supervisory board is chaired by Iwona Sroka, with Paweł Homiński as vice-president. The other members are Waldemar Markiewicz, Wiesław Rozłucki, Małgorzata Rusewicz and Katarzyna Szwarc, alongside Karnowski, the exchange's governing bodies page says, and it describes each of the seven as meeting the independence criteria in the articles.
The audit committee is chaired by Homiński and, with Karnowski, comprises Markiewicz and Sroka. The strategy committee, chaired by Sroka, includes all seven members. The remuneration and nomination committee, chaired by Szwarc, has three members, Homiński, Rusewicz and Szwarc, and the regulation and corporate governance committee is chaired by Rozłucki with Rusewicz and Szwarc. Karnowski sits on neither of the last two, the page shows.
The supervisory board serves a joint three-year term and meets at least once a quarter, the release said. The general meeting, which the exchange describes as its highest authority, elects the board's members and amends the articles of association, the company page says. The management board is led by President Tomasz Bardziłowski, with Marcin Rulnicki as chief financial officer since September 2024, the governing bodies page shows.
What the documents do not say
Neither the release nor the governing bodies page gives the vote split on the resolution, the share of capital represented at the extraordinary meeting or the date on which the board's joint term ends. The shareholder table on the exchange's company page carries a 31 December 2023 date, so it does not show any change in the free float since then. The release also does not say whether the meeting was called at the request of a shareholder.
The exchange reports a board that meets at least quarterly, so its fourth-quarter meeting, due by the end of December 2026, will be the first full quarter in which Karnowski sits on the audit and strategy committees.