Perhaps convenient that these revelations appear as the election nears?
- A new controversy has opened up over the Easter weekend: that of over 120,000 immigrants who were able to enter Portugal during the ‘dying days’ of former borders agency SEF without the necessary background checks.
- “These applicants were given a one-year residence permit without any face-to-face assistance and/ or manual verification of documents submitted, such as the compulsory criminal record”.
- This lapse was verified by AIMA – the agency created to replace SEF – which calculated that 120,157 people had managed to get residency authorisations without proving that they ‘ticked all the boxes’ to actually qualify for them.
- AIMA’s analysis quickly threw up various anomalies: some of the files that obtained residence permits “found blank sheets of paper in place of the criminal records that had to be submitted by the applicants”; others detected false documents in place of criminal records.