Stymied by laborious visa procedures, business groups call for a boycott of Europe.

Roadblock..

Getting a visa to Europe is like getting a visa to heaven,” Mohamed Farid Khamis, owner of Oriental Weavers, one of the world’s largest carpet companies, said recently.

His comments came after a public battle with the German embassy, which denied visas to five Oriental Weavers employees looking to seal a $25 million (LE 137.5 million) contract with a German company. After a complaint to the German ambassador, Khamis got his visas, but awarded the contract to a Swiss firm instead.

It was the latest in a series of trials and tribulations that local business people have gone through in pursuit of the elusive Schengen visa, which allows travelers to visit any of 25 Western and Central European countries on a single pass.

Getting the visa has always been hard. Business people have complained about everything from being forced to wait for hours in the sun outside consulates to having visa applications rejected for spurious reasons.

But now, after a string of holdups involving high profile businessmen, national business organizations are lobbying for a boycott of European countries with difficult Schengen visa procedures.

Egypt sold 6 billion (LE 41.4 billion) worth of exports to Europe in 2009 alone and bought more than double that in imports. Those sorts of numbers might make it hard to follow through on a full boycott, but as the Khamis deal shows, some businessmen aren’t afraid to put their money where their mouth is.

Application Denied

Egypt is ranked seventy-eighth on the Henley Visa Restriction Index, a global ranking of travel freedom enjoyed by nationals of 89 countries. The ranking places Egyptians’ freedom to move between countries without a visa in the same company as citizens of Rwanda (tied with Egypt at 78), China (79), Sri Lanka (79), Libya (80) and Angola (81). Egyptians can only enter 34 countries without obtaining a visa prior to arrival, and those are mainly Middle Eastern and African neighbors. European countries are not included, and despite increasing bilateral trade activity, businessmen are not exempt from tedious visa procedures.

Real estate developer and chairman of the Egyptian Businessmen’s Association Hussein Sabbour has personally experienced the difficulties of obtaining a Schengen visa.

Sabbour was invited to Spain by a real estate developer who wanted to invest in Egypt’s construction sector. Despite applying for a visa at the right time, 48 hours before the scheduled meeting the Spanish embassy still hadn’t issued the visa. It was only after the Spanish businessman made some calls that Sabbour was told that his visa was ready. The Spanish Embassy declined to comment on the incident.

In his capacity as chairman of the Shooting Club in Dokki, Sabbour faced another situation with the Belgian embassy. The Egyptian girls water ballet team was invited to participate in a competition in Belgium. After applying for visas with all of the appropriate documents, the entire team was rejected.

“The embassy sent a disgusting letter,” Sabbour says. It included 10 reasons for the rejection, one of which stated that the girls had not competed in an international competition before. “All of [the reasons] were nonsense.”

This time, Sabbour took the issue to parliament and asked the foreign relations committee to discuss the matter. The Belgian ambassador only moved on the issue when Sabbour started to lobby against Belgian companies working in Egypt.

“I stopped all construction materials my company imports from Belgium,” he says. “Moreover, I convinced Al-Ahly Sports Club officers to cancel a contract with a Belgian company who was contracted to install playground floors in Al-Ahly.”

Only then did the Belgian ambassador come to apologize for the incident.
In a meeting attended by heads of national business organizations in May, attendees complained about having to stand in lines for hours in the heat while waiting to apply for visa, Khamis said. By the end of the meeting, the group agreed to look for other business opportunities outside of the 15 countries that implemented the Schengen agreement.

“I want to tell businessmen to switch from some European countries such as Spain, Germany, France and Belgium and direct their business to others,” Sabbour says. “Our response to the impolite way foreign embassies treat us should be very strict. They are not the only source of imports. We can go to England, which has easy visas.”

Schengen Woes
Ambassador Marc Franco, head of the EU delegation in Egypt, doesn’t deny that there are problems with Egyptians applying for Schengen visas. However, he doesn’t think businessmen here are singled out for rejection. He says he has no numbers on the rejection rate of businessmen, but, after conversations with colleagues at European embassies, he gathers that the percentage is low.

Marie Masdupui, the French consul in Egypt, says that since she has held the post, the rejection rate for businessmen is generally around 5% and sometimes as low as 3%. The number of long short-stay visas (three- to six-month visas that are frequently used by businessmen and good for five years) that the French embassy issued has increased 35% in the last three years, according to Masdupui. But those numbers are not enough to erase the poor perception of embassy treatment in the mind of the public and the business community.

Franco thinks that this “false perception” is a result of the way applicants are received at consulates and embassies.

“The irritation of the businessmen and the public at large is inspired by "the practical arrangements [of] the visa issuing, rather than the visa issuing [itself],” he says. “I myself wouldn’t like to stand in the sun waiting to get into a consulate.”

According to Franco, talks about harmonizing the process of issuing Schengen visas will start soon among embassies. Consulates will share their experiences in order to reach a unified process. But this might not necessarily make obtaining the Schengen visa any easier.

“The [visa] regulation will not change. It has to be applied as it is,” Franco says. He adds that eliminating queues and providing better reception conditions to applicants depends on the budget and physical locations of each consulate. This means that some embassies will not change the way they conduct the process.

“The reception at a consulate might be a consideration,” he says.

“But I don’t think it is the determining consideration for businessmen for their way to do the business. I think the cost and benefit consideration is more important than others.”

However, as any businessman will attest, time is money. Wasting hours in line and having to resort to clients to pull strings in order to cut a deal in Europe are not exactly cost-effective measures. And if they continue, people like Sabbour and Khamis might just take their business elsewhere. bt