A Ukrainian job agency has been accused of abusing the Swedish asylum system by selling false asylum reports to help its customers get the right to work in Sweden.
The Pelekh Agency is said to have provided access to jobs to Ukrainian nationals by selling “asylum stories” that customers would give at a Swedish migration board office and then would be eligible to work in the country while their claim was being processed.
A man named Nasarji, who claims to have been a client of the agency, told broadcaster Sveriges Radio, “They told me to say I was seeking asylum and I got a story that I would tell the Migration Agency.”
The broadcaster found that clients of the agency would pay around 12,000 Swedish Krona (£1,060/$1416) to get a job in Sweden but soon found they were taken to a migration board office and told to apply for asylum.
An office in Ukraine openly admitted the deal to a journalist from the broadcaster, who posed as a Ukrainian looking for work.
Sweden Granted 1.2m New Migrant Permits Last Decade, One-Fifth of Residents are Foreign Born https://t.co/eXC2LsLbkz
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 9, 2020
“You will get an asylum report that you will learn by heart and tell the Swedish Migration Board. But with 99 per cent certainty, you won’t get asylum, but while your case is being investigated, you get permission to work, that’s how it’s done,” a woman at the agency said.
The Migration Board has also become aware of the agency’s activities and has filed reports with the police. Pelekh Agency, meanwhile, declined to officially speak with the broadcaster.
While Sweden has not seen the same level of immigration since the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, the country still sees tens of thousands of new migrants, many of them asylum seekers, every year.
Over the past decade, Sweden has granted over a million residency permits and mass migration has been the primary driver of population growth in the country with as many as one-fifth of Sweden;’s residents were born overseas.
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