The European Commission has told The Malta Independent on Sunday that the buck cannot be passed to external service providers when it comes to the issuing  of visas.

At the end of January, the National Audit Office (NAO) criticised the issuing of Malta visas for Algerians, thousands of which had been issued between March 2014 and September 2015, and reporting that one out of every four Algerians granted a Maltese Schengen visa never returned home.

The NAO investigation, which has been ongoing since November 2015 at the behest of the Public Accounts Committee, found that during the period under review, 14,640 applications had been received, of which 6,779 were granted and 7,589 had been refused.

In reply to a set of questions sent at the time of the publication of the NAO’s report, the Commission told this newspaper on Friday that: “Under EU rules, the responsibility for processing and deciding visa applications lies with the Consulates of Member States.

“It is Consulates that decide whether or not to grant a visa after having checked that the applicant fulfils all the entry conditions, including an assessment of irregular migration risks.”

The Commission said that it regularly evaluates how Member States implement the common visa policy, and that the revised Visa Code, recently agreed by the European Parliament and the Council, “will strengthen the rules on Member States’ monitoring of external service providers. Member States will now have to report to the Commission once a year about the monitoring activities.”

The Commission, however, made it clear that the buck could not be passed to the external service provider, and that responsibility for the issue of visas lay with the member state.

“Where external service providers are involved,” the Commission said, “they may only be entrusted with the collection of visa applications and the supporting documents. Member States are solely responsible for monitoring of the operations and workflow of external service providers to ensure that the legal framework is respected.”

Malta’s NAO had found that “there was no visibility over the process beyond the point where the Consul decides to issue or refuse a visa, at which stage third parties are involved.

“This heightened the risk of wrongdoing, precluding the NAO from establishing whether the issuance of visas was intentionally prolonged to elicit payments for the hastening thereof.”

The NAO also found that the setting within which the Consulate operated had “facilitated the incidence of allegations.

“The fact that the Consulate operated from the same premises as the VFS – the Consulate’s external service provider – blurred the distinction between the two from the perspective of applicants.”

Aggravating matters were the difficulties encountered by prospective applicants when seeking to schedule appointments with the VFS.

The NAO found that, “Gaps in the screening process, attributed by the Consul to a lack of resources, also resulted in a less than optimal system of vetting applicants. Another factor was the poor contract management of the VFS by the Consulate, with various contractual obligations not adhered to with no consequence.

“Whether any other action could have been taken by the government remains subject to debate, conditioned by the context within which the Consulate was operating, as well as its operational set up,” the NAO had found.

“Moreover, the NAO acknowledges that there were aspects of the allegations beyond the control of the Consulate, particularly the involvement of the VFS and other agents in the visa process.”

“The extent to which this and other shortcomings could be attributed to the lack of experience of the Consul is debatable, with the language-related issues identified by this Office compounding matters.”

The NAO found that the police had taken action by seeking the views of persons of interest, in particular, the Consul in Algiers and a Maltese-Algerian travel agent – from whom most of the allegations originated, and who was subsequently stripped of his Maltese citizenship under a most dubious pretext in what seemed have been a retaliatory measure, according to Opposition MP Jason Azzopardi, who recently raised the issue in a parliamentary adjournment speech.

According to the Commission, after the flagrant and widely-flagged issue of visas by the Consulate in Algiers which, at the time, had been headed by a relative of the Prime Minister, matters appeared to have settled down.

Asked for the Commission’s updated stance on the matter, a spokesperson pointed to the following years of 2016 and 2017.

“According to the statistics on short stay visas that the Commission publishes every year,” the spokesperson pointed out, “Malta processed approximately 3,000 visa applications in Algeria in 2016 and the refusal rate was 82 per cent.

“In 2017, Malta processed approximately 5,000 applications in Algeria and the refusal rate rose to 92 per cent. The average refusal rate for Member States processing visa applications in Algeria is 30 per cent.”