While the debate rages on the European response to the influx of migrants on the island of Lampedusa, another affair has poisoned the relations of two neighbors of the EU: Germany and Poland. For several weeks, the Polish government has been the subject of “serious allegations” – according to Germany – about an alleged vast visa fraud which affects some of its members. So much so that Berlin and Brussels demanded from Warsaw a “rapid and complete clarification” this Wednesday, September 20. European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson sent a letter to the Polish authorities and demanded a response by October 3. The Polish government has rejected “absurd” allegations.
This tension between the two countries follows revelations from the German daily Bild – followed by revelations from numerous Polish media – which claims that nearly 350,000 workers could have entered the European Union illegally over the last three years. At the center of this traffic is, according to several media, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which would have granted at least 250,000 visas for several thousand euros, or even several tens of thousands of euros per sesame.
The German Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, even had a telephone conversation on this subject with her Polish counterpart, and the Polish ambassador to Germany was summoned to the ministry, said this source.
Influence peddling and illegal immigration network
This scandal of visa and influence peddling, which has now reached the government, has ignited the campaign before the October legislative elections in Poland. At the end of August, a deputy minister, Piotr Wawrzyk, was dismissed from his post, officially due to a “lack of sufficient cooperation”. According to private radio RMF FM, he was subsequently hospitalized last week after attempting suicide. According to the information portal Onet.plwhich cites anonymous sources within the ruling party and the ministry, this deputy minister was in fact fired for having “helped to create a network of illegal immigration from Asia and Africa” via consulates as well that external companies are paid for this trafficking in human beings.
Journalists claim in particular that the vice-minister and his collaborators sent consulates lists of hundreds of names of people to whom these administrations had to quickly issue visas, often without verification. Onet.pl cites in particular the case of Indian nationals posing as Bollywood filmmakers and who, after intervention by the deputy minister, obtained multiple entry “Schengen” visas. These allow you to enter and exit the European area as many times as desired during its validity period.
7 arrests and an open investigation
The Polish authorities were even, according to Onet.pl, alerted to the affair by intelligence services from other countries. An allegation that the Polish executive denies. On the side of power, the nationalist populist party is trying at all costs to minimize the affair. According to them, the case only concerns “a few hundred visas”.
“Unfortunately, the German press has latched onto the opposition’s completely absurd narrative about the scale of what we were facing. I spoke to the German Interior Minister yesterday (…). I explained the real scale” of the problem, Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski told Radio Zet. “I explained (to her) the real scale” of the problem, “I reassured her that it was simply an opposition election campaign and I told her not to believe these rubbish,” he added.
Last Friday, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledged “irregularities noted in the process of issuing visas”, and announced the resignation of the head of its legal office. The prosecution, which is investigating “influence peddling” likely to have made it possible to speed up visa procedures, indicates that seven people have already been arrested in this case, none of them being state officials.
The PIS, immigration “mafia”?
The affair is more than embarrassing for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has used strongly anti-migrant rhetoric for years, which allowed it to win the legislative elections in 2015. Poland last year completed construction of a steel wall along its border with Belarus, intended to deter migrants from crossing it, and deployed thousands of troops to protect it.
The migration issue is one of the main subjects exploited by the government which decided to hold on October 15, the day of the legislative elections, a national referendum covering, among other things, this subject. The Poles will be able to say in particular whether they wish to “remove the barrier at the border with Belarus” and whether they are in favor of “the entry of thousands of illegal immigrants” into the country, according to a relocation mechanism proposed by the EU .
After the revelations about this scandal, the opposition does not mince its words, referring to a “visa mafia”. “The biggest scandal in Poland in the 21st century,” according to Donald Tusk, president of the Civic Platform (PO, liberal), the main opposition party. In a video published on the Internet, the opposition party accuses the government of having brought in “250,000 migrants from the Middle East and Africa”, and adds: “the referendum is a lie”.