A thousand euros to “fix” the file of an asylum seeker: two administrative agents from the Bouches-du-Rhône prefecture are on trial in Marseille for corruption and aiding illegal stay, until December 15.
Hired in September 2019 at the Single Window for Asylum (Guda), Abdalla Ibrahim, a 55-year-old Franco-Syrian, admitted on Wednesday before the criminal court to interventions for the benefit of the Turkish community: “We know that I am accommodating and that I can intervene,” explained the defendant on the stand, leaning on a cane.
The fraud aimed to avoid the “Dublin” ax, a procedure consisting of returning the examination of an asylum application to the country where the foreigner was registered upon entering European territory. The file was then processed by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, and the applicant obtained a certificate authorizing a regular temporary stay.
Civil servant dismissed in 2021
In the absence of control by his superiors, Abdalla Ibrahim could not record the fingerprints of an applicant already recorded on the Eurodac database or cause a positive response from Visabio, another system for processing European visas granted, to disappear. to strangers.
In total, “I received 9,000 euros, either by doing something or by making people believe that I was doing something,” admitted the civil servant, dismissed in May 2021. Administrative investigations identified eleven fraudulent files but, specifies the investigating judge, “this is a low estimate, the administrative investigation carried out having revealed that at least 10% of the files processed by Abdalla Ibrahim presented an anomaly”.
A beneficiary mentioned payment in the form of work carried out free of charge at the defendant’s home. This official was very popular with his superiors. “I speak four languages and the prefecture has made a lot of money by saving on the interpreting market,” said the defendant.
At his side, one of his colleagues responds to three interventions made at the request of Abdalla Ibrahim, for a total remuneration of 100 euros. He had requested it in particular for an alleged childhood friend whose fingerprints had been taken in Germany and who should therefore have been “Dublined”.
The two officials made him escape being fingerprinted while recording his request. It later turned out that this Turk had been arrested in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques and had been reported by the German authorities for activities linked to terrorism, having a “high rank within the PKK”.