| More than a thousand Russian tourists were unable to obtain a French visa on Friday A “visa scandal” of an unprecedented scale in the Russian tourism market broke out last Friday. The French consulate did not issue visas to about a thousand Russian tourists planning to travel to Moliere's homeland this weekend. Travel agencies whose clients suffered are at a loss as to the reasons for what happened and cannot yet estimate the extent of their financial losses.
The processing time for tourist visa applications at the French Embassy is one week. Unlike the United States and some other countries, France does not require Russian citizens to appear in person for an interview at the consulate. Therefore, the documents of tourists traveling in organized groups are delivered to the consulate and taken away from there by travel agency couriers.
On the last working day of the week, the usual rhythm was disrupted. In the afternoon, passports with visas were not issued at all. At 18:00, when the consulate was scheduled to close, the assembled couriers were simply told that there would be no delivery that day. At the consulate at that moment there were employees of 30-40 companies. Estimates of how many passports they must have received that day vary widely, from one to two thousand.
In response to the natural indignation of the couriers, French diplomats distributed to them a short written statement on behalf of Vice-Consul Patrick Mathon: “The Consulate cannot issue visas on March 19.” Then the guards deported the tourist figures who continued to make noise outside the sovereign French territory directly to Bolshaya Yakimanka Street.
The general director of the Hertsog travel agency, Mikhail Musinyants (185 clients of this company did not receive visas), told the Vremya Novostei newspaper: “We had three charter flights planned for Saturday to Grenoble, to the ski resorts. We had to cancel one of them and shuffle the passengers of the other two, which, naturally, did not cause them any joy. We kept the third plane under steam until the evening, hoping that we would be able to negotiate with the French so that they would issue visas on Saturday. Nothing came of it. We have now applied to fly out on Monday, although no one can guarantee that our clients' documents will be received then. “I do not exclude that the situation will develop according to the snowball principle: after all, by Monday the French must process not only what they had left from Friday, but also what they had planned for Monday.”
Lanta Tour Voyage had only one charter flight scheduled for Saturday, and it had to be sent, although out of 150 seats in the Tu-154 cabin, only 60 were occupied. A total of 111 Lanta Tour clients did not receive French visas on Friday . The company's president, Lyudmila Puchkova, called the behavior of the French consulate "unprecedented" and said that even if the visa scandal is resolved on Monday, it is not clear how to deliver the "detained" tourists. There are no longer any tickets for Aeroflot and Air France flights to Paris in the coming days. And sending another half-empty charter is unprofitable.
The heads of the affected travel agencies say that there have been no mass refunds of tours yet, but refusals will probably begin on Monday. Tour operators try not to calculate the size of their financial losses until the further course of events becomes clear.
They also differ in their assessment of the motives that caused the incident. According to one version, this is a demarche by consulate employees, intended primarily for their own superiors at the French Foreign Ministry. Perhaps the consuls consider the amount of workload assigned to them to be too great. Deprived, like other employees of the French Republic, of the right to strike, they can express their attitude to work with such a striking gesture.
Lyudmila Puchkova from Lanta Tour, on the contrary, believes that the scale of the scandal exceeds the level of “a simple vice-consul Patrick Maton.” She is convinced that the action was taken on command from Paris. The president of Lanta Tour, however, cannot logically explain why Paris needed this.
Due to the weekend, the Vremya Novostey newspaper was unable to find out the official position of the French Embassy. Mikhail KUKUSHKIN |
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