It is the Indian company VFS Global which soon will take over all handling of visas applicants from Moscow, newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reports. The company will establish its own visa office in the Russian capital. The visa applications from St Petersburg, Petrozavodsk and Murmansk will still be handled by the existing consular offices. However, the embassy staff will not let go of the control of the applications. The main part of the actual application processing will remain in the hands of embassy officials. Meanwhile, also Russian authorities are considering to outsource the same visa services for applicants from Helsinki, the newspaper informs. “The aim would be to speed up visa work and to bring more efficiency”, representatives of the Russian embassy in Helsinki say. The embassy has already received bids from many companies, one of them VFS Global, whose services Russia is already using in London.
