German government officials held talks Tuesday with their Polish counterparts asking them to clarify how many visas were issued in an illegal program in which some Polish consulates issued visas in Africa and Asia in exchange for bribes, an official said.
Poland has been shaken for weeks by reports that its consular sections issued about 250,000 visas to migrants from Asia and Africa since 2021 in return for bribes of several thousand dollars each. Poland is a member of the EU’s visa-free zone known as Schengen, and once those migrants arrived in Poland they could cross Europe’s borders freely — including into neighboring Germany.
