The Guardian, London
The French foreign ministry confirmed yesterday that corruption investigations were being conducted at eight of its embassies, after it emerged that the consulate in Sofia had sold tens of thousands of French visas to Bulgarian prostitutes. Evidence had been found of a similar flourishing trade in visas at the embassies in Iran, Armenia, Togo, Tunisia, Benin and Rwanda, it claimed.
The embassy in Morocco was accused of selling prized places at the international lycee in Rabat. `We are determined to get to the bottom of this trafficking in visas, which unfortunately does not seem to be confined to Bulgaria,` a ministry spokesman, Francois Ravasso, said. `The ministry will show zero tolerance to any of its diplo mats who are found guilty of such practices.`
The Bulgarian scam seems to be the biggest so far, and resulted in the recall and replacement earlier this month of the ambassador to Sofia, Dominique Chassard. Two of his staff, including the head of the consulate`s visa section, Rudy Demange, and two Bulgarian businessmen have been placed under formal investigation. Mr Demange has been recalled to a job in France. The police believe that blank visa forms were being sold through tourist agencies for pounds 100-pounds 300.
`The number of French visas issued in Sofia actually doubled, from 30,000 in 1999 to 60,000 last year,` a police investigator said. `That`s like one in every hundred Bulgarians suddenly wants to visit France. There had to be something dodgy going on.` The affair was discovered late last year when vice police in eastern France and Belgium noted a suspicious increase in the number of young Bulgarian streetwalkers arriving on their patch. The women protested violently when arrested and produced apparently legitimate business visas, issued by the Sofia consulate, which entitled them to a stay for month or two in France to gain work experience at a variety of little-known companies in various places in France.
Investigators who went through the files in Sofia found that obviously fake documents had been accepted in support of visa applications, that several non-registered Bulgarian travel agencies had been granted visa processing rights, and that the companies named as having agreed to take on the women for `work experience` knew nothing about them. `We estimate up to 20,000 or 25,000 visas were issued illegally in this way,` the police investigator said. `The scam was so large and well-organised that we`re not ruling out the involvement of organised crime.` Mr Chassard insisted that his replacement in Sofia had been planned for several months, and that he had `never intervened for anyone`s profit in the issuing of a visa under conditions that did not conform with the relevant rules and procedures`. But in the past three years the French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, has taken to ordering frequent surprise inspections of embassies and consulates because of the increasingly heavy pressure that diplomats, and particularly their local staff, are coming under in countries whose residents are desperate to reach western Europe.
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