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Residence permit bribery probe ‘likely to grow’

A top prosecutor believes more Migration Board (Migrationsverket) employees will likely be implicated in an ongoing bribery probe launched after two employees were arrested on suspicions of selling residence permits.

Published: 25 March 2013 08:26 CET

Residence permit bribery probe 'likely to grow'

The Swedish Migration Board (Migrationsverket) is investigating a number of suspected fraud cases, after several of its employees are believed to have sold residence permits.

An employee from the Malmö branch of the agency remains held on remand on suspicion of aggravated bribery. And another employee who was recently released from custody remains suspected of bribery.

A previous manager, who currently works in another state department in southern Sweden, is also suspected of involvement in the scam.

“The ongoing bribery investigation is going to grow. I’ll be looking at people both inside and outside of the Migration Board,” state prosecutor Nils-Eric Schultz told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper (DN).

The agency is also launching an internal task force to tackle the corruption.

“This is a unique decision. I interpret this to mean that the Swedish Migration Board recognizes that there are problems here,” Schultz told the paper.

A spokesman for the board dismissed concerns that the bribes are a consequence of an increased workload for agency employees.

“It has nothing to do with efficiency demands,” Migration Board spokesman Fredrik Bengtsson told DN.

He added that the task force won’t be “hunting down individuals”.

“We will be supporting individual workers where there are risks of them being influence,” he said.

“I don’t want to single out anyone, but these risks can apply to employees who are making decisions involving a fellow countryman, for example.”

Bengtsson added that he could not comment on whether he thought the investigation would lead to the discovery of more cases of bribery.

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Swedish Migration Agency boss admits confusing 'patchwork' of rules

In an interview with the Sydsvenskan newspaper, Ribbenvik, who will end his 24-year career at the Migration Agency in May, complained that migration legislation had become ever more complicated and confusing over the past decade as a result of a series of coalition governments where different parties have “sought to cram in all their pet issues”.

Since the refugee crisis in 2015, there has been the temporary migration law from 2016, which made temporary residency the default for asylum seekers, and then the two ‘gymnasium laws’, which he described as “half-amnesties”.

The two laws opened the way for people who had come to Sweden as unaccompanied child asylum seekers and whose asylum application had been rejected to stay if they finished upper secondary school and got a job.

Now, Ribbenvik worried, a new barrage of new laws from the three-party right wing government and their far-right backers, the Sweden Democrats, risked making the system even more complicated.

“The legislation is starting to become too complicated for anyone to understand. It’s absolutely impossible to explain in the media, because you don’t have the time,” he told the newspaper. “We need to have our absolutely smartest migration people in our legal unit to work everything out.”

When the new government announced its intention to phase out permanent residency, the agency’s phones were deluged with worried calls from permanent residency holders.

Ribbenvik summarised the message to Sydsvenskan as: “OK, you can stay… no, you can’t stay.”

“I have a great amount of understanding for the confusion this has caused,” he said. “Debate articles attack the Migration Agency, and we’re an easy target. But this is a consequence of the legislation there has been in recent years.”

After Sweden’s government announced that Ribbenvik’s contract was not going to be extended, Björn Söder, a Sweden Democrat MP and member of the parliament’s defence committee, celebrated the decision.

“Time to tidy up Agency Sweden,” Söder wrote on Twitter. “Kick the asylum activists out of the agency.”

In the Sydsvenskan interview, Ribbenvik characterised himself as a “proud bureaucrat”, who was apolitical and saw his role as enacting the orders of politicians in the best way possible. He didn’t join the agency because of a passion for immigration issues, but because he needed a part-time job while he finished his law degree, he said.

“I read now that I’m a Director-General appointed by the Social Democrats. So am I going to be politicised now, right at the end? Because I never have been before.”

Very often, he said, attacks like Söder’s “say nothing about the accused, but a lot about the accuser”.

He did say, however, tell the newspaper that he had been surprised by how quickly the debate had shifted in Sweden from the days when most of the criticism the agency received came from those wanting more liberal treatment for asylum seekers to today, when they are accused of being too lenient.

“As someone who’s worked here for 24 years, I’m stunned over how the debate has shifted in recent months, when the whole time I’ve been here, it’s been the opposite: ‘why do you analyse people’s language, why do you do age assessments?’. We’ve always been criticised from the other direction.”

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