BERLIN – German executive officers held talks Tuesday with their Polish opposite numbers asking them to explain what number of visas had been issued in an unlawful program in which some Polish consulates issued visas in Africa and Asia in change for bribes, an respectable mentioned.
Poland has been shaken for weeks by reports that its consular sections issued about 250,000 visas to migrants from Asia and Africa since 2021 in go back for bribes of a number of thousand greenbacks every. Poland is a member of the EU’s visa-free zone referred to as Schengen, and as soon as the ones migrants arrived in Poland they might pass Europe’s borders freely — together with into neighboring Germany.
Warsaw’s conservative executive confirms that some wrongdoing has came about, and government have made some arrests and dismissals, however they insist that the size is not as nice as what the Polish media have mentioned.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser spoke through telephone with Polish counterpart Mariusz Kaminski on Tuesday afternoon, whilst Polish Ambassador Dariusz Pawlos used to be invited to talk to State Secretary Bernd Krösser on the internal ministry in Berlin, a governmental respectable instructed The Associated Press.
The German officers requested their Polish opposite numbers to offer information at the timing and selection of visas issued in addition to the nationalities of the visa recipients. The German executive respectable mentioned the Polish officers had been instructed that the German executive expects that the intense allegations of conceivable visa fraud be resolved. The German officers additionally requested what countermeasures the Warsaw executive used to be hanging in position.
The respectable, who spoke on situation of anonymity as a result of the delicate nature of the problem, additionally famous that the German federal police have considerably larger border police measures on the German borders, specifically at the German-Polish border, as a result of the present migration scenario. However, the newest build up of border patrol measures took place earlier than the stories in regards to the alleged visa rip-off turned into public and wasn’t immediately connected to it.
Details in regards to the corruption scandal had been coming to mild in Poland a month earlier than the rustic’s parliamentary election on Oct. 15, leaving the ruling birthday celebration, Law and Justice, suffering to regulate the wear regionally.
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Vanessa Gera reported from Warsaw, Poland.
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