A civil servant from the foreigners’ admission service in the French city of Nancy was referred to the public prosecutor’s office on Thursday to face allegations of corruption and fraud after being accused of facilitating the stay of illegal migrants in exchange for cash.
The official, along with an accomplice, is now facing charges of passive corruption, assisting irregular stay of an organized gang, and falsification of documents.
As reported by France Bleu, the case stems from an investigation launched in September 2024, when authorities discovered a suspiciously altered document. This led the administration to notify the Office for the Fight against the Illicit Traffic of Migrants (OLTIM), which quickly identified a dozen fraudulent cases.
“In September 2024, the existence of false documents in the procedure for regularizing the administrative situation of a foreigner was brought to the attention of the Nancy branch of the Office to Combat Illicit Migrant Trafficking (OLTIM). Checks on the documents in the files confirmed the existence of forgeries,” said François Capin-Dulhoste, the Nancy public prosecutor, in a press release.
Upon further investigation, 15 falsified regularization files were traced back to the same civil servant, each allegedly processed for a €25,000 bribe. On Tuesday, the official, along with her accomplices and several beneficiaries of the fraudulent documents, were placed in police custody.
Authorities have now opened a judicial investigation to uncover the full extent of the scheme and identify all those involved.
The public prosecutor announced the investigation would seek to “identify the members of the sector, to establish their respective implications, to update the exact magnitude of the financial flows and to seize the product of the offenses.”
