The offices of the Foreigners’ Authority in Munich were searched by the police and the public prosecutor’s office, along with four private homes of suspects, on Tuesday. The investigation is focused on the suspicion of bribery in connection with residence permits. Five current and one former employee of the authority are allegedly involved; only one of the employees is not in custody, as the former employee was arrested on March 6.
The suspects are accused of having conspired to make illegal administrative decisions in cases involving foreign nationals in exchange for payment. The prosecutor’s office stated that the suspects are currently being investigated for the suspicion of bribery and document forgery.
The former employee is believed to have acted as a mediator and also distributed the payment to the city’s employees, while also creating fake documents. All of this allegedly took place between May 2022 and January 2024.
The investigation was initiated by a complaint from the city of Munich itself, as internal investigations had previously been conducted. The authorities had noticed irregularities in the handling of cases through regular control mechanisms.
It is still unclear whether the investigation might be related to the recent attack in Munich, in which the perpetrator, Farhad N., who had initially arrived in Munich as an unaccompanied minor refugee, was found to have a residence permit issued by the city of Munich that was not registered in the central registry of the Foreigners’ Authority. If this residence permit was one of those allegedly obtained through bribery, this would explain the anomaly.
The opposition in the Munich city council is currently calling for thorough investigations, but not the resignation of the head of the authority, Kreisverwaltungsreferentin Hanna Sammüller-Gradl (Alliance 90/The Greens).
This is not the first similar incident in Munich, as a similar case was reported in 2020. In Hamburg, employees of the Foreigners’ Authority were arrested in February for corruption.