Who will become the British successor?

[IMG=18289-3788]

   In the beginning of December we will know the results of the tender, announced by the British embassy on the 14th of October 2005. The aim of the project is to choose a partner company who by spring 2006 will take up the function of accepting documents for the British visa from the diplomatic mission. A mandatory requirement for candidates is that they have acting representative offices in large towns of Russia. As BANKO Information Service discovered, an identical system is being successfully used by the British embassy in India and China. The probable reason for this search for a mediator is the huge amount of work undertaken in the visa department of the embassy, which is explained by the increased demand for visas for entrance to the United Kingdom (according to the official site of the British embassy in the recent 3 years it grew by 20%). Officially, from the 28th of November the visa department will stop accepting applications from private persons, although in practice it will stop working from the 25th of November as it will prepare for the forthcoming changes. From that moment all citizens wishing to receive a visa will have to submit documents only through accredited travel firms.
   Information about which company may receive the function is currently kept secret. What is more, it is also unknown whether they are considering a travel firm or a courier service like Pony express which is used, for example, by the Consulate of the USA in Russia. At the moment the destination’s experts express different opinions about the issue. The market shows anxiety that if the mediator is a travel firm, it will establish a monopoly as it will have too much power in its hands. ‘The company who will take up the responsibility of accepting the documents will start dictating its conditions to other market participants’ – said Denis Bashkirov, commercial director of Great Rivers company to a BANKO correspondent. Some experts also forecast a possible increase of the Consular fee. ‘Additional services for reception and delivery of documents can lead to a serious increase in the cost of the visa’, believes Andrei Ignatiev, head of the board of directors of BSI group. According to Ignatiev, increase of the cost of the visa may cause a drop in the number of clients.