A civil servant in Nancy, France, has landed in hot water, accused of orchestrating a bribery scheme to help illegal migrants stay in the country. Allegedly, the official charged an eye-watering €25,000 per case, sparking a judicial investigation into corruption, document falsification, and organized crime.
The trouble began in September 2024 when authorities stumbled upon a suspiciously tampered document during routine checks. This discovery prompted an alert to the Office for the Fight Against Illicit Migrant Trafficking (OLTIM). As François Capin-Dulhoste, Nancy’s public prosecutor, revealed in a press release, “Checks on the documents in the files confirmed the existence of forgeries.”
OLTIM’s deeper dive uncovered a dozen fraudulent cases, all tied back to a single civil servant working in the foreigners’ admission service. It didn’t stop there—investigators traced 15 falsified regularization files, allegedly created in exchange for hefty bribes. On Tuesday, the accused official, her accomplice, and several beneficiaries of the scam were detained by police.
The charges against them are weighty: passive corruption, assisting illegal residence as part of an organized gang, and document falsification. Authorities have now launched a full-scale judicial probe to untangle the scheme’s web, identify all players involved, and track the illicit financial flows.
The investigation, as the prosecutor stated, will aim to “identify the members of the sector, to establish their respective implications, to update the exact magnitude of the financial flows and to seize the product of the offenses.”
For now, this case serves as a stark reminder of the shadowy dealings that sometimes lurk behind immigration systems.
