Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

WORK PERMITS

Award-winning Australian coffee entrepreneur told to leave Sweden

Australian coffee entrepreneur Steve Moloney has three times been named Sweden's best barista and has set up a successful business in his six years in the country. But now he has been told he may have to leave Sweden by the Migration Agency.

Published: 15 February 2019 17:37 CET
Updated: 19 February 2019 08:56 CET
Award-winning Australian coffee entrepreneur told to leave Sweden
Steve Moloney speaks to The Local about his work permit rejection. Photo: Love Coffee Roasters

Moloney was initially given less than two weeks to arrange to leave the country after the Migration Agency rejected his application for a residence permit as a sole trader (egen företagare), although this has now been extended for an extra week in order to file an appeal.  

The rejection came more than a year after the entrepreneur made the application, and the reason is that his visa application is being treated as a new application rather than an extension of his existing permit, and therefore he should apply from outside the country. But for the Australian, that means huge disruption to his personal life and his business.

He first came to the country on a one-year working holiday, later returning on a partner (sambo) visa to join his girlfriend. During their relationship, Moloney established himself as a sole trader with his company The Barista League, and after his relationship ended, his visa as an employee took over two and a half years to be approved by the Migration Agency, due to the huge increase in processing times.

READ ALSO: 'We are all extremely lucky to be working in coffee here in Sweden'


Photo: Fabian Schmid

“In the meantime, I was headhunted to a company in Gothenburg and applied for a visa based on the new employer and was finally granted residence in July 2017,” Moloney tells The Local. Later the same year, he decided to leave that job due to issues with the company management, and because his company The Barista League had grown so significantly, he applied for a visa as a sole trader. 

“I've invested so much in the company and my life here – I've got accommodation, friends, a girlfriend. My life is more here than back in Australia and it feels ridiculous that a bureaucratic technicality could get me thrown out after six or seven years,” Moloney explains.

READ ALSO: What to do if your work permit renewal gets rejected

“The business is growing super fast and really well, but I need to arrange work for the future and I can't do that when there's this uncertainty. The business is Sweden- and European-centric so moving back to Australia would mean losing the network and systems I'm working with now. And a lot of companies are relying on me to deliver on contracts i have with them.”

The entrepreneur has already received several references from business contacts, who have outlined the potential disruption and negative financial impact on their own companies if Moloney were to leave the country.

READ ALSO: What getting deported from Sweden (twice) taught me about life and business

“It's a strange discrimination against people who want to do something for themselves. I obviously feel very stressed, and there's a lot of disappointment.”

“It feels as if on a shallow level Sweden is all about startups, attracting talent and getting capital pumped into Stockholm for all these new ventures, but the bureaucracy doesn't work for international business owners that are in Sweden,” he explains. “My experience is that it is really difficult to be a small business owner, especially if you are trying to do something different, rather than a standard product within the existing system.”

Moloney also criticized the agency's lack of clarity, saying applicants are “basically walking in blind” with staff refusing to answer questions. He had been under the impression his new permit would be treated as an extension, rather than a new application, until he reached the decision in February.

Sweden's strict legislation around work permits and long processing times have caused difficulties for hundreds of internationals working in Sweden, including employees and entrepreneurs. In October, The Local spoke to American entrepreneur Peter Lincoln who was told to leave the country despite having launched a successful brewery.

In Lincoln's case, he had fallen foul of rules requiring foreign workers to earn a minimum salary, because he and his Swedish business partner had chosen to live off savings and invest their profits back into their business for faster growth. Earlier that year, another foreign entrepreneur was threatened with deportation for giving himself a pay cut, a decision he made in order to allow his company to grow. 

Sweden's strict rules in the area are designed to stop workers being exploited, but have led to thousands of foreign workers being forced to leave the country. In addition to entrepreneurs, the legislation has hit the tech sector particularly hard, with numerous cases of foreign workers deported over minor errors in their paperwork.

READ ALSO: 

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.
For members

WORK PERMITS

How you can get a faster decision from Sweden’s Migration Agency

If you've been waiting six months or more for a ruling from a Swedish agency there is something you can do to force the agency to take a decision. So is this worth doing in work permit, residency permit and citizenship cases?

Published: 26 July 2024 11:21 CEST
Updated: 4 August 2024 14:31 CEST
How you can get a faster decision from Sweden's Migration Agency

If you’ve been waiting a long time for your decision to come through you can, by law, submit what is called a “request to conclude”.

What is a ‘request to conclude’? 

According to Sweden’s Administrative Procedure Act, which came into force in 2018, if an application you have made has not been decided “in the first instance” within six months at the latest, you can request in writing that the agency decide the case, using a process called a dröjsmålstalan, or “request for a case to be expedited”. 

The agency then has four weeks to either take a decision or reject the request to conclude in a separate decision. You can then appeal this rejection to the relevant court or administrative authority. 

You can only use the request to conclude mechanism once in each case. 

READ ALSO: Sweden’s government snubs Migration Agency request for six-month rule exemption

How do you apply for a ‘request to conclude’ a Migration Agency case? 

It’s very easy to fill in the form on the Migration Agency website, which only asks you to give your personal details, say whether your case concerns a work permit, residency permit, right of residency case, or ‘other’, and list any other people applying along with you. You then send the application by post to the Migration Agency address on the form. 

Does it work? 

A lot of people do seem to have success using the mechanism. The Migration Agency in section 9.1 of its annual report says that it is forced to to prioritise those who do this trick after a six month wait ahead of those who have spent longer in the queue. This is particularly the case for the ‘easy’ applications. 

More or less everyone, though, has their initial request to conclude refused, seemingly automatically without the request ever being seen by a case officer. 

Most them are then successful when they then appeal this refusal to the Migration court, with the Migration Agency stating on page 91 of its annual report that it lost 96 percent of such cases in 2021, 80 percent of such cases in 2022 and 77 percent of such cases in 2023.

As the Administrative Procedure Act states clearly that a decision should come within six months, the Migration Agency has in most cases a weak legal position.  

Once your request is rejected you only a short time to appeal, so it is important to act quickly, even if the agency fails to inform you that your request has been rejected. It you have heard nothing and the four weeks are up, it’s important to chase your request so you can appeal before the deadline expires. 

Even those who are rejected and don’t appeal sometimes get results, finding they are asked to submit their passport shortly afterwards. 

However, this is not always the case, so it is essential to go ahead with the appeal anyway, even if your passport is requested. 

What do people say? 

The mechanism appears to be particularly popular among British people, with one member of the Brits in Sweden Facebook page saying that “pretty much everyone has used it”, but it is also used by other groups, such as Indians in Sweden. 

One British woman said she had been informed about the rule by her case officer, and, although she was worried it might make a negative decision more likely, is glad she did so. 

“I used it as it was offered and I didn’t want to wait any longer. I thought there was nothing to lose and it didn’t cost anything, only a bit of time!” she said. 

She had her request for decision accepted, with the officer in four weeks getting back to her requesting that she send in two more forms, one documenting her relationship with an EU citizen, and another on her ability to support herself and pay for her accomodation. 

“It’s a shame they didn’t advertise it more widely and I didn’t hear about it before. as I could have got a decision earlier on my residency application and then could have applied for permanent residency much sooner,” she said. 

Another British woman said that she had decided to send in a request for a decision after she had been waiting for seven months for a decision on citizenship and her case officer told her to expect to wait as long as 36 months, despite being a simple case given that she had lived in Sweden lawfuly for five years, working throughout. 

“I knew of the request to conclude option and used it. They waited the full month before responding and rejecting it, as was expected. But the next day also assigned me a case officer and asked for my passport,” she remembers. “I believe they did this so I wouldn’t appeal their rejection and get the courts support for them to hurry up and process it.” 

Two months later, her citizenship was approved. 

An Indian man said he had used the mechanism no fewer than three times, firstly when extending a work permit, then when applying for permanent residency for a dependent, and thirdly, when applying for citizenship.

In the first case, he said, the request had been accepted on a first attempt and his work permit extension — for which he had been waiting for more than a year — was granted 28 days later.

The second request, which he made after discovering his dependent had no case officer after seven months, was rejected. They appealed, the court ruled in their favour and their case officer gave a positive decision a month later. 

Finally, in the citizenship case, the court ruled in his favour after the request was rejected, but 40 days later he is still waiting for a decision on the initial application.

Does sending in a request increase your chance of having an application rejected? 

Anecdotally, it doesn’t appear to. 

“It was a concern, yes,” the first British woman said, saying she had been told that sending in the form was “no reason to reject my application.” 

“But this is Sweden and in my opinion, even simple or clear-cut things can be a gamble,” she added. 

How does the mechanism affect handling times overall? 

While the request-to-conclude mechanism might help applicants in individual cases, the Migration Agency complains that it has been making the problem of long processing times worse by creating an addition set of processes case officers need to handle, and also by affecting the agency’s ability to prioritise. 

“The fact that many individuals request that their cases be decided is taking up a lot of resources and leading to processing times generally becoming longer, not least as many delay cases are appealed to the court,” Mikael Ribbenvik, the Migration Agency’s former Director General said when asking for the agency to be exempted from the system in April 2023. 

SHOW COMMENTS