Four people, including a woman employed at the Ministry of Education and three intermediaries, were arrested Monday by anticorruption prosecutors and officers of the National Anticorruption Center (NAC), on suspicions of organizing a scheme of extorting money for speeding up authentication of documents.

The arrests come after NAC carried out a series of 17 searches at the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Education, at home addresses and in the suspects’ cars.

NAC said the scheme involved staff from the MoJ and MoE, as well as notaries public and translation agencies, who requested illegal fees for speeding up authentication of diplomas for education applicants, a procedure that normally lasts 30 days.

For a fee of 50 euros per document, amounting to 250-1,500 euros for the entire set, the suspects offered to cut those times to a few days or even several hours.

The acts qualify as crimes of influence peddling and passive corruption, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment and bans on holding public posts.