The criminal trade in Bulgarian visa applications was targeted in a police operation on February 16 when the third highest-ranking Interior Ministry official, Stefan Hristov, head of the Ministry’s Migration Directorate, was arrested.

Hristov is under investigation for allegedly helping an organised crime group which helped foreign nationals enter Bulgaria with false documents, which later made it possible for these foreign nationals to remain in the country by applying for, and getting, long-term residence permits, issued by the Migration Directorate.

According to media reports quoting sources close to the investigation, the criminal group was formed by Moldovans living in Bulgaria who offered their compatriots the service of arranging Bulgarian residence for 15 000 euro.

According to Bulgarian-language 24 Chassa daily, the investigation of Hristov started at the end of 2009 when some of his subordinates at the Migration Directorate became suspicious that his lifestyle was more lavish than his salary should allow. As the investigation progressed, police arrested several Moldovan nationals in Sofia who pointed their fingers at Hristov, 24 Chassa said.

Allegedly, Hristov had signed approvals of requests for Bulgarian visas without the proper documentation. In this way, clients of the criminal group got legitimate Bulgarian visa papers which enabled them to apply for long-term residence permits. The problem was that these visa papers were based on false documents.

For this service, "applicants" paid between 10 000 and 15 000 euro to the criminal group. However, so far there have been no details about how the money from the fees was shared out among the Moldovan group now under arrest and Hristov, which might become the weak point in prosecutors seeking to prove Hristov’s alleged guilt in court.

For now, he faces charges only of committing an administrative crime. This is based on statements by a number of his subordinates who claimed that he had overstepped his authority.  

On February 17, another Migration Directorate official was charged with abuse of power. The allegations in an Interior Ministry statement were similar to those against Hristov. It said that a 49-year-old official in the northern town of Dobrich had issued documents containing false information to foreigners. According to prosecutors, the full picture of the criminal scheme involving the granting of false documents to foreigners would become clear in the next 10 days.

Hristov’s arrest comes after a number of statements by Minister without portfolio responsible for Bulgarians abroad, Bozhidar Dimitrov, on the illicit trade in Bulgarian visa applications.

Soon after being appointed to the Cabinet in July 2009, Dimitrov said that there was a thriving trade in Bulgarian visa applications in Macedonia and Moldova, where companies were acting as intermediaries in getting Bulgarian passports, charging fees ranging from 200 to 3000 euro and managing to get passports for their clients within three months.

On January 20 2010, the Cabinet announced amendments to the Bulgarian Citizenship Act aimed at speeding up processing of applications, and reducing the possibilities for corruption. The reason for this change was an increase in the number of applications involving falsified documents. The amendments introduce a one-year deadline for a decision on the application and specify that institutions to be involved in the decision process are the Interior Ministry and the State Agency for National Security, Dimitrov said.

Future applications will have to be submitted in person, either to the Justice Ministry or the diplomatic mission abroad, cutting out the current practice of intermediaries. According to Dimitrov, intermediaries being involved in the application process created opportunities for corruption, as most falsified or modified documents were filed by middlemen.

Since September 2009, after the new Cabinet was appointed, 6500 applications for Bulgarian citizenship had been approved, mainly from Albania, Israel, Macedonia, Moldova, Russia, Serbia and Ukraine.