Steve Moloney, from Brisbane, says he applied for a new work visa – replacing an old one – more than a year ago and has just been told the country’s Migration Agency won’t even open his case to consider it until he leaves Sweden.

“It’s extremely frustrating,” he said. “I’ve built all this stuff up in Sweden and now everything is sitting on a cliff edge, based on the whims of a very bureaucratic agency.”

Moloney is not the only entrepreneur to have fallen foul of Sweden’s Migration Agency.

In December successful digital developer Farzad Ban told The Local Sweden he moved to Sweden age 14 with his family but has twice been deported – most recently in December because he missed a few hundred dollars’ worth of insurance payments that came to light when he applied for permanent citizenship.

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Ban said the Swedish Migration Agency’s system was “unbelievably broken”.

And in October US entrepreneur Peter Lincoln was forced to leave the country after nine years, despite running a successful brewery, because he had paid himself too low a salary while his business was getting up and running.

He told The Local that Sweden was not a good place to run a small business.

The Local reported that the Migration Agency’s strictness was making life for foreign professionals extremely unstable, with the IT sector hit particularly hard by deportations despite suffering a skills shortage.

According to official figures, Sweden’s Migration Agency had a backlog of more than 10,169 work permit applications as of the end of January. The backlog is growing: in January it received 4494 work permit applications but made only 3838 decisions.

Moloney, 28, moved to Sweden in 2012 after meeting a Swedish girl while travelling. He worked a holiday visa, came back to Australia for a year then returned to Sweden on a partnership visa.

He swapped to a working visa when they split up – but it took a “whopping” two and a half years between his application and when he finally received the visa, Moloney said.

In the meantime he started winning competitions in the Swedish barista scene – in 2016 and 2017 he was the Swedish barista champion and he won another competition in 2018.

He set up a consultancy company that promotes barista competitions in Sweden and around the world.

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And a year ago he decided to switch to a sole trader visa, to concentrate on his growing business.

But after a year of “basically no communication”, Moloney said, he has just been told the Migration Agency “won’t test the application or even open the application for a visa because I’m meant to have applied from outside the country”.

But given the time the Agency takes to process applications, he knows this means a year or more away from his Swedish business.

“It’s not feasible,” he says. “If I didn’t love living here I’d pack up and go.”

He has appealed the order, but in the meantime faces uncertainty, stress, and a lot of explaining every time he goes in and out of the country.

“I feel for people who don’t have the privilege I have, who are waiting to be deported to a country they can’t even go to,” he said. “In the end I have a pretty good deal but it’s still stressful and frustrating.”

The Swedish Migration Agency has been contacted for comment.