The National Police has dismantled another criminal organization dedicated to rigging the union of Spanish citizens with immigrants in an irregular situation to obtain documentation, once registered before a notary as de facto couples in Catalonia. The agents have made a total of 48 arrests, including the leader of the gang and ten members of the gang, in addition to 37 individuals accused of falsifying documents, in Barcelona, ??Cornellà, Sant Adrià del Besòs and Girona. The criminals allegedly facilitated the registration of a minimum of 77 fraudulent de facto couples, as reported yesterday by the General Directorate of the Police.
Catalonia is a pole of attraction for this type of criminals due to the ease of registering in the Registry of Stable Parelles of the Justice Department of the Generalitat. Once this procedure is completed, immigrants are now in a position to apply for a community relative residence card.
The gang charged the migrants 12,000 euros in exchange for managing the entire process aimed at regularizing their residence, and paid 8,000 to the men and women who accepted the fake wedding. The organization had a group that looked for Spaniards willing to deal and another dedicated to recruiting undocumented immigrants, Moroccans or Algerians, residing in Spain, France or Belgium.
The detainees had organized a system to clandestinely introduce immigrants from France and Belgium into Catalonia. The first stop was Figueres, where they had several apartments where they housed these people for 50 euros a day while they waited for all the paperwork to be ready. Once their objective was achieved, they returned to these countries with a residence permit as a family member of a community member.
