MFA chief: I don't feel complicit in visa scandal as there's no such thing

Minister Rau commented on both these issues at a press briefing in New York, at the beginning of his five-day visit related to the 78th U.N. General Assembly. The MFA chief went to New York alongside President Andrzej Duda.

Asked by "Fakty" TVN reporter Marcin Wrona about the irregularities found in Poland's visa-granting process, the minister said he "doesn't feel complicit in the affair". "I'm not considering to step down over it," he added.

"There's no affair. ... We've checked the data and it's enough to point out that in Poland in 2022 we issued the number of Schengen visas that correspond to the following proportion: less than two visas per 1,000 residents of Poland. In that same period, our French partners issued 20 visas per 1,000 residents, and the Germans - 10 visas," the MFA chief explained.

Rau added that "the irregularities pertained to the issuance of approx. 200 documents". He compared it to the scale of the 2 million visas Poland has granted in the last 30 months, of which more than 1.5 million were granted to Ukrainians and Belarusians.

"If this is the scandal of the century, then I'd rather speak about a cascade of fake news," the minister said. Asked if in his opinion nothing has actually happened, he replied: "Of course, it's no big deal".

Minister Rau was also asked about a document regarding Poland's defence plans along the Vistula river line declassified by the country's defence ministry. He said that if this defence concept, adopted by the previous government, was still effective today, "we would have experiences like that from Bucha on the eastern flank".

On August 31, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki dismissed Piotr Wawrzyk as secretary of state at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The ministry said the reason for PM's decision had been "a lack of satisfactory cooperation," but Polish media reported the visa scandal as the unofficial cause.

According to Onet, Wawrzyk was fired from the government and removed from the ruling PiS party's election lists because he had helped his associates to create an illegal channel used for smuggling migrants from Asia and Africa to America, through Europe.

The National Public Prosecutor's Office and the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA) are conducting separate investigations into irregularities in the visa-granting process. Parliamentary opposition accuses the government of corruption and claims that hundred of thousands of documents have raised suspicions.

Deputy director of the Department for Organized Crime and Corruption of the National Public Prosecutor's Office, Daniel Lerman, said at a press conference on Thursday (Sept.14) that the investigation into the visa affair had been launched in March, 2023, based on materials gathered by the CBA. He added that their investigation concerned only several hundred visas.

Deputy coordinator of special services Stanisław Żaryn said that day that none of the visa applicants concerned by the investigation posed a security threat to Poland. He added that Polish special services had been looking into visa-granting irregulaties since July 2022.

The Polish MFA said on Friday it had fired the head of its legal service and cancelled all its contracts for outsourcing visa applications.

Former deputy minister Piotr Wawrzyk was admitted to a hospital on Friday.