Migrant legalisation scheme exposed inside Moldova’s migration service
Police have uncovered another corruption case involving employees of Moldova’s General Inspectorate for Migration (IGM), where officials are repeatedly caught helping foreigners legalise their stay for a fee. This year, the case has reached the level of a department head.
In early September 2026, the Service for Internal Protection and Anti-Corruption (SPIA) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, together with prosecutors from the Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Organised Crime and Special Cases (PCCOCS), announced that another migrant legalisation scheme had been uncovered.
The criminal case involves a “group of persons”, including the head of one department of the General Inspectorate for Migration. Investigators say the suspects claimed they had influence over IGM officials and could secure favourable decisions on issuing temporary residence permits to foreigners for employment purposes.
For these “services”, they received €1,200 from one citizen: €150 for each of eight foreigners whom they promised to help legalise in Moldova. The money was handed over in two stages in May and June 2026.
One of the suspects was detained and, at the request of prosecutors, placed in pre-trial detention for 30 days. The IGM department head is being treated as a suspect in the case, while searches led to the seizure of documents, mobile phones and other items relevant to the investigation.
A record of recurring corruption cases
This is not an isolated episode, but another link in a long chain of similar offences reported by the press year after year. Yet little appears to change: despite arrests, migration officials continue to break the law.
In March 2025, a court sentenced IGM employees in Bălți, commissioner Vadim Melnik and inspector Victor Fotescu, for extorting 7,000 lei from a Ukrainian woman with four children who was living illegally in Moldova. They threatened her with deportation unless she paid.
The punishment was modest: suspended sentences of three and two years respectively, fines and bans on public service for seven to eight years. The case had been investigated for four years. The two men were caught red-handed in November 2021, but only in March 2022 did they appear in court and resign from their posts.
The brazenness with which the officials extorted bribes from a family of illegal migrants was striking. First, the corrupt officials proposed that they pay a 300-lei fine for illegal residence in Moldova.
Then, after switching their victims’ phones to airplane mode to prevent any possible recording, General Inspectorate for Migration commissioner Vadim Melnik demanded 2,000 lei from the Ukrainian woman’s husband. He paid. A month later, the officials demanded another 6,500 lei from the Ukrainian illegal migrants, but the family had only 5,140 lei.
They came back and paid again, saying they had no more money. The “kind-hearted” Melnik returned 1,401 lei to the woman for what he described as transport expenses. Officers from SIS and prosecutors from PCCOCS then burst into the office to detain the corrupt officials. This was only one of many cases of extortion by officials in Moldova’s migration service.
Larger networks and failed clean-ups
In September 2024, an even larger network was uncovered. The group, which involved IGM employees, operated through consultancy companies and helped migrants obtain residence permits and citizenship for sums ranging from $3,000 to $10,000 per person.
At the time, more than $90,000 and €12,000 in cash were seized from company offices. The case showed that the migrant legalisation scheme was not limited to individual bribe-taking, but could operate through organised networks around official procedures.
A month earlier, the entire leadership of the General Inspectorate for Migration had been dismissed in connection with the case of a Turkish citizen who had been living in Moldova despite being on an international wanted list at the request of Britain. He was later killed in Moldova, after which the Ministry of Internal Affairs opened a criminal case that led to the dismissal of senior migration officials.
Yet this did not reduce the appetite of migration officials for bribes. Within a month, another corruption scheme had been exposed. And these are only the cases that have become public.
Soft punishments leave Moldova losing to corruption
The obvious question is why this keeps happening. Are employees of the General Inspectorate for Migration so incapable of learning from repeated arrests of their colleagues that they continue to take bribes and legalise migrants?
Or is the problem with courts that hand down extremely lenient sentences, without confiscating illegally acquired property and without imposing real prison terms? It is shocking when a corrupt official caught red-handed by police while receiving a bribe continues working until the trial and only then resigns. With this approach to fighting crime, Moldova is doomed to keep losing to corrupt officials.
