While the government of Poland adopts strong anti-migration stances, the ministry of foreign affairs is engulfed in a “visa scandal” with corruption allegations for granting access to the Schengen area. The scandal grows as legislative elections take place in a month.
On August 31, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki dismissed Piotr Wawrzyk as secretary of State at the ministry of foreign affairs and laconically explained the decision as a “lack of satisfactory cooperation.”
Mr. Wawrzyk was responsible for consular affairs, which included the visa issuance system, and was the author of a draft regulation on visa facilitations for temporary workers — such as for Polish farms — from about 20 countries. The regulation assumed the possibility of employing up to 400,000 foreign workers in Poland.
But a few hours before the dismissal, the Central Anticorruption Bureau visited the ministry, Gazeta Wyborcza first reported. The prosecutor’s office and the Central Anticorruption Bureau are now investigating irregularities in the visa application submissions.
The scale of what Polish media call the “visa scandal” remains unclear, from hundreds of irregularities for the most conservative figures, to hundreds of thousands of visas issued suspiciously, according to the government opposition.
As more information is being disclosed, media reports show a system of suspicious private intermediaries, glitches in the procedures, defective IT systems, pressure and obscure decisions to grant visas that give the right of entry to the Schengen area.
According to the Polish news portal Onet, Piotr Wawrzyk did not hesitate to actively be involved in who should get visas. Consuls in multiple cities across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East received lists of people who should be granted access to Poland’s territory from Mr. Wawrzyk and his team.
Poland a “migration hub”
For instance, last year, the consular section at the Polish Embassy in New Delhi and the consulate general in Mumbai, India, received lists of film crews who should obtain visas immediately. Scenes of the Indian production movies Asati, and Milton In Malta were shot in Poland.
But people on the lists were actually not related to the movie industry at all. Instead, they were Indians who paid between 25,000 and 40,000 zloty (5,700 and 9,200 dollars) to get to the United States via Poland.
Consulates were pressured to grant them visas. And thanks to Poland, they would get multi-use Schengen visas that would allow them to travel to Mexico, and then cross the border illegally to the United States. The Overseas Criminal Investigations Divisions (OCI) from the U.S. Department of State would have then alerted Polish diplomats about a new channel of illegal immigration.
For Law and Justice (PiS), the populist national-conservative governing party that puts security, national sovereignty and anti-migration policies at the forefront of its political agenda, a scandal about corruption and irregularities in granting masses of visas doesn’t bode well a few weeks before an election.
Even more so, along with the parliamentary elections on October 15, the government designed a referendum that will ask four questions, including: “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, in accordance with the forced relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy?”
For Piotr Zgorzelski, a member of Parliament from the agrarian Polish People’s Party, Poland is perceived with the scandal “as a banana republic that has become a migration hub.”
Members of Parliament Michał Szczerba and Dariusz Joński, two members of the Civic Coalition, a center-right political party in the opposition, lead a parliamentary investigation and claim they have documents showing the minister of foreign affairs, Zbigniew Rau, was aware of the issues.
Yesterday, Gazeta Wyborcza reported that the ministry received alerts of corruption and large-scale trade of Polish visas as early as 2016, with a report coming from the consulate in Abuja, Nigeria. Poland would be seen in Nigeria as an easier entry point to the Schengen area than other countries.
Piotr Wawrzyk and the ministry of foreign affairs have remained silent on the accusations.
