Five years for “enterprise”
Five years in prison and confiscation of property — a relatively lenient sentence for a former mathematician and former Kiev resident Anatoly B. The Cologne regional court established a startling fact: this gentle, intelligent forty-year-old man with a beard and glasses, sitting on the defendant’s bench next to two lawyers, created a giant network of illegal importation of labor from Ukraine to the black market. And not just labor. It is assumed that the same network was used by drug and human traffickers, the mafia, which readily laundered its dirty money in Europe, and even Chechen terrorists.
Actually, it all did not last long. Anatoly B. began to “get going” in 2000, and at the end of summer 2001, an alert employee of the district police department of the Cologne-Kalk area noticed suspicious activity around a building on the territory entrusted to his care. Drug addicts, homeless people, and other dubious individuals constantly hung around there. It turned out they were attracted by the opportunity to easily earn 50 marks for a small favor — a signature under a pre-written letter that certified a guarantee for a Ukrainian citizen unknown to them who wanted to obtain an entry visa to Germany.
Strange as it may seem, these guarantees were passed by the Cologne city administration without verification. At first, the law gave way — the police found no basis in it to prohibit the trade in signatures. But an energetic and ambitious senior prosecutor, Egbert Bulles, took up the case. And the case moved forward.
Kiev conveyor
Bulles attempted to reconstruct the technology of guests from Ukraine arriving in Germany. It turned out that the German embassy in Kiev operates a high-productivity visa conveyor belt: a thousand a day, and on some days up to two thousand. The trial colorfully described what a crowd seethed every day in front of the embassy, how food kiosks grew like mushrooms for the needs of those waiting, and even a luggage storage opened where one could check a suitcase in the morning in order to board a bus to Germany immediately upon receiving a fresh visa.
In 2001, almost 300,000 visas were issued in Kiev. There is no doubt that most of these people went to Germany not just for no reason, but on business. “It should be clear to a child,” sternly remarked Judge Ulrich Hepner, “such a number of Ukrainians cannot afford a vacation in Germany!”
In all fairness, it must be said that the “vacationers” did not necessarily head to Germany. They spread throughout Europe. Ukrainians with German visas were found traveling and working part-time in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. In recent years, the German embassy in Kiev became the main supplier of Schengen visas for Ukraine — 85% of the cherished holograms were obtained precisely there.
Legal trick
And prosecutor Bulles also discovered that most Ukrainians, as well as other guests from the East, arrived in Germany with a so-called foreign insurance passport, a very powerful document. It was issued for a relatively moderate sum (up to 230 euros) and was intended to provide insurance in case a guest of Germany could not pay for medical care or the return trip. Actually, the criterion for issuing a visa is the so-called “readiness to return,” and an embassy official must interview every applicant to rule out suspicions that the person intends to stay abroad. But the “green” leadership of the Foreign Ministry, striving for liberalization, instructed all embassies in 2001 to consider the presentation of a foreign insurance passport as sufficient guarantee and to look for no other.
As a result of telephone wiretapping authorized by the prosecutor’s office, the police learned by heart the name of Anatoly B., a recent recipient of social benefits and now an entrepreneur who had opened almost a dozen travel agencies that in fact served no tourists, but only drew up two-week travel itineraries as a cover story for Ukrainian illegals seeking to enter Germany.
Bulles informed the Foreign Ministry first of all about the giant criminal network he had uncovered. “But they only laughed at me,” the ambitious prosecutor recalled with bitter resentment at the trial. Meanwhile, the brisk trade in foreign insurance passports right near the embassy in Kiev also alerted German border guards from the embassy security, who informed the Federal Ministry of the Interior.
Foreign Ministry — accessory to crime
The Ministry of the Interior, thanks to the efforts of the Federal Criminal Police Office, which was well acquainted with the problem of illegals in Germany, forwarded the information to the Foreign Ministry in 2002. But the “Green” State Secretary Ludger Volmer, with the knowledge and consent of the “Green” Minister Joschka Fischer, confirmed his reputation as a liberal by prescribing the approach “in dubio pro libertate” instead of “in dubio pro securitate,” that is, in translation from legal Latin into colloquial language — whether German or Russian — “to resolve doubts in favor of freedom (of movement), not in favor of reliability.”
This phrase was recalled to Vollmer in court - Judge Heppner described it as nothing less than a "putsch of the Foreign Ministry against existing laws" - and in the press. And political opponents from the CDU have built more than one threatening statement on it. True, the practice of using insurance passports as a guarantee was universally abolished in March 2003, and in Kiev as early as June 2002. But officials of the Ministries of Foreign and Internal Affairs, as well as employees of the embassy in Kiev, are under suspicion of either direct complicity or connivance with the gang leader Anatoly B. New chains are being uncovered. The ambitious prosecutor Bülles has already opened 250 cases and even counts as many as 350 suspects. The Düsseldorf prosecutor's office has also brought charges against a group of accomplices consisting of two German citizens and one Russian citizen, who operated in Neuss and smuggled hundreds of illegal immigrants into Germany.
The gang leader will not answer for everything
Anatoly B. was caught very opportunely. The problem exists, and it is conspicuous, and irritates the average person, and is a thorn in the side of the authorities, and it is unknown how to approach it. Because on both sides there are too many people interested in this smuggling: those who want to 'make off', those who want to earn extra money abroad, those who want to take advantage of cheap labor not protected by any laws or union requirements, and those who want to profit from all these desires. The press wrote about hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants besieging Europe from the east, that the largest criminal network had been uncovered, and that the gang leader earned up to 30,000 euros in some months.
Specifically, Anatoly B. is charged with 550 cases of illegal entry of people from the CIS into European Union countries. He charged $250 per client for his services. Thus, it is easy to estimate the total amount of his income - undoubtedly illegal - over about two years. Whether this man, sitting alone on the defendant's bench, had direct accomplices in the Cologne administration and in the embassy in Kiev, or simply cleverly took advantage of the general atmosphere of liberalism and carelessness, and the readiness of officials for corruption, is unclear, but it is clear that he is not the only one responsible for all the illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe who leaked into Germany. Anatoly B. is guilty, there can be no doubt. There are doubts that with his arrest the flow of illegal immigrants has greatly thinned and that it can be so easily cut off at all. Nature abhors a vacuum. This task will provide work for the criminal police and legislators for many years, and it is hardly within the power of either to solve it. Because the true name of the problem is globalization. And it comes under different departments.