Bribes to speed up residence cases at the Pomeranian Voivodeship Office
Detentions in November 2024 and June 2025. The investigation concerns benefits accepted in exchange for faster decisions.
What happened
In November 2024, five people were detained, including an official of the Pomeranian Voivodeship Office. According to investigators, the scheme involved speeding up residence legalisation cases in exchange for financial benefits. The arrests were made in Gdańsk, Gdynia and Bydgoszcz.
The figures cited by investigators: from several hundred to several thousand złoty per foreigner, with the official’s annual income from this estimated at at least 30,000 zł. Dozens of people of various nationalities were said to have used the scheme.
Pośrednicy powoływali się na wpływy w Pomorskim Urzędzie Wojewódzkim, za które również przyjmowali korzyści majątkowe od obcokrajowców.
(Intermediaries invoked their influence at the Pomeranian Voivodeship Office, for which they also accepted financial benefits from foreigners.)
In June 2025, nine more people were detained in the same investigation — Ukrainian citizens. They were charged under art. 230a § 1 of the Criminal Code: giving a financial benefit in exchange for intermediation in settling a matter at a public office. According to investigators, the official had been accepting benefits since 2022.
The connection to delay
This is precisely the mechanism described in our petition to the Pomeranian Voivode. When the ordinary route takes a year or more, intermediaries appear promising a shortcut — and a market forms in which people pay for something that ought to work on its own.
It is worth noting who was charged here: alongside the official and the intermediaries, the foreigners who paid. Delay does not only extend the waiting — it puts people in a position where breaking the law starts to look like the only way out.