Germany has summoned Poland’s ambassador to the country, Dariusz Pawłoś, to discuss the revelations regarding allegations surrounding the issuance of visas in exchange for bribe money. German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has also talked to her Polish counterpart about the issue as well.
According to Reuters, Germany wanted to know how many visas have been issued, to which nationalities, and what is being done by the Polish government to deal with the irregularities.
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk told Poland’s press agency PAP that he felt the German move was a political demonstration rather than any real attempt to seek clarification.
Mularczyk expressed surprise that the Polish ambassador should be summoned when it had already been briefed by the German embassy in Poland on the issue.
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On Friday, Poland’s prosecutors informed that the investigation of the irregularities in the issuing of visas identified only 268 cases out of the hundreds of thousands of visas issued over the year. No evidence of mass irregularities had been uncovered. As Remix News reported yesterday, the scandal led to Deputy Foreign Minister Piotr Wawrzyk attempting suicide; he is the minister accused of accepting bribe money in exchange for issuing improper visas.
According to the Polish Foreign Ministry, over the last 30 months, it has issued 1,950,000 Schengen visas and 1,782,000 visas entitling an applicant to enter Poland. Over 500,000 of each type of these visas were issued to Belarusians and nearly a million in each of these categories were issued to Ukrainians. Another 375,000 Schengen visas and 250,000 Polish entry visas were issued to citizens of other countries.
In another twist to the story, three former Polish prime ministers, who are all currently MEPs, wrote to President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen asking her to let Poles know if the EU commission has its own sources of information about corruption in the issuance of Schengen visas. They also asked whether people who had been issued visas by Poland are seeking to enter the labor markets of other EU member states.
All three MEPs represent the opposition, which has been for the past few days attempting to hype the visa issuance issue in order to attack the Law and Justice (PiS) government for being inconsistent over migration and for tolerating corruption in the issuing of visas to individuals from outside the EU.
