On Thursday, the citizenship and migration department of the Police and Border Guard Board in Estonia initiated secondary checks over 147 residence permits that are linked to the scandal involving PRU politicians, writes LETA/National Broadcasting.
Director General of the Police and Border Guard Board Raivo Küüt noted that since the beginning of 2011, the board has been carrying out additional checks on residence permits issued earlier to foreigners from third countries that had been applied for members of executive bodies of enterprises.
“As we have found that there has been an overly abrupt surge in the number of applications for certain type of residence permits, we have carrying out supervisory proceedings on all of them and time will tell, how many of those will have to be declared invalid,” explained Küüt.
On 65 cases, the invalidation of residence permits issued to members of companies’ executive boards has already been initiated and on 15 cases of those, the residence permits issued have already been declared invalid. At the same time, the police authorities have thus far not found any cases where residence permits received for engaging in business in Estonia have been misused. Now all the names that have been listed in newspapers in connection with the scandal involving Pro Patria and Res Publica politicians will be checked.
Liis Valk, head of the aliens division of the citizenship and migration department of the Police and Border Guard Board, stated that the board suspects as well that the residence permits referred to during media coverage of the scandal have not been applied for in order to do business in Estonia, but simply for getting to the other EU countries.
“We have made decisions where, in our estimations, individuals have knowingly applied for residence permits in Estonia without proper reason – their intent has never to been to settle here,” she explained. “However, it is not always possible to reach such conclusions as it is relatively difficult to prove it. As a rule, what we find during follow-up checks is that enterprises have not started operating and thus holding relevant residence permits by particular persons is no longer justified,” added Valk.
Valk stated that a little more than 300 persons have received valid residence for doing business in Estonia while more than a thousand persons have received residence permits for working as a member of executive organs of enterprises.
Juhan Tere
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