Polish Premier Donald Tusk’s drive to break the ex-communist nation’s links to Russia ’s energy chain by modernizing the domestic coal industry is giving Miroslaw Taras sleepless nights. Tusk tapped Taras, a 59-year-old ex-miner whose leadership of publicly-traded Lubelski Wegiel Bogdanka SA made it profitable before he left in 2012, to do the same for state-owned rival, Kompania Weglowa SA. Kompania, Europe’s largest coalminer, is buried in debt and teeters on bankruptcy at a time when the dispute between Russia and Ukraine risks disrupting the 89 billion cubic meters of gas shipped annually from OAO Gazprom (GAZP) through Ukraine, or 55 percent of its total exports to Europe. Tusk is betting Taras’s ability to fix Kompania and streamline its bloated workforce without slashing jobs will cushion energy shocks from the east. “I feel damn responsible for all these people and each one individually,” Taras said in an interview on […]