By Andreas Rinke
BERLIN (Reuters) -Germany summoned the Polish ambassador on Tuesday, and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser spoke to her Polish counterpart to discuss allegations about a cash for visas affair for migrants that has roiled Polish politics, government sources told Reuters.
The Polish government is facing opposition accusations that it was complicit in a system in which migrants received visas at an accelerated pace without proper checks after paying intermediaries. The German interior ministry’s action is the first known international repercussion of an affair that has so far been dominated by local debate.
Germany is seeking urgent clarification as to how many visas might have been issued and the nationalities of the recipients, people familiar with the matter said, and also wanted to know what countermeasures the Polish government was taking.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government is seeking a “quick and complete clarification of the serious allegations of possible visa fraud,” one of the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Asked to comment on Berlin’s steps, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk told Polish state-run news agency PAP: “It’s about clarifying the accusations that some Polish and German media are making against Poland – in a completely unjustified way – in the context of the migration crisis.
“The ambassador explained that these are unjustified accusations. I think he reassured our German partners and I think this meeting had that purpose,” Mularczyk said.
Germany has already publicly expressed its concern about the issue and deployed hundreds of additional border police to the German-Polish border.
The scandal erupted just as ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party is seeking to secure a third term in power in parliamentary elections on Oct. 15, with getting tough on illegal immigration an important theme of its campaign.
Poland’s foreign ministry said on Friday it had fired the head of its legal service and canceled all its contracts for outsourcing visa applications.
It came a day after seven people were charged over the alleged irregularities in granting work visas and two weeks after anti-corruption officers looking into the scandal searched the foreign ministry and a deputy foreign minister was also dismissed.
PiS has accused the opposition of exaggerating the extent of the issue and suggested some of the problems date back to the opposition’s time in power.
But in the clearest sign yet that it acknowledged some link, Deputy Interior Minister Maciej Wasik said on Friday the dismissed Deputy Foreign Minister, Piotr Wawrzyk, was “at least politically responsible for the visa issue”.
(Reporting by Andreas Rinke, additional reporting by Alan Charlish and Karol Badohal; writing by Matthias Williams, editing by Friederike Heine and Tomasz Janowski)
