A woman who set up sham weddings between European women and African migrants so they could stay in Britain has been jailed.

Ana Rita Teixeira Ferras, 26, set up at least three fake marriage in 2012 between women from the EU and men from west Africa.

She even took part in a scam herself and married a man in 2007 and helped produce false payslips to be used by those who had had sham marriages when they made applications to the Home Office to stay in the country.

Ferras even fled back to her home country of Portugal when police caught up with her at her home in Highbrook, Northamptonshire, and was only brought back to the UK after a European Arrest Warrant was issued.

During a hearing at at Northampton Crown Court Ferras admitted four counts of facilitating a breach of immigration law. She was jailed for four years and three months.

Several accomplices in the ring have previously been convicted for their part of the scheme as part of a Home Office investigation called Operation Marco.

Jessica Nunes, 21, from Corby, Northamptonshire, was handed a 12 month suspended sentence in April 2013.

Nunes, a student, married a man called Oluwasegun Omoniyi, also a student in another fake wedding.

Read More

Now that registrars are starting to clamp down on sham marriages, a new scam has been created for the savage hordes to make use of: gay marriage.

Officials are so worried that they will be accused of homophobia if they question the faggots, that they are just going ahead with the ceremonies, even when they are suspicious of them.

All the fake bride has to say is “Yeah, I’m gay” and that’s it, no more questions for them and a golden ticket to the welfare system and the NHS.

Mirror:

Criminal gangs are offering illegal immigrants sham same-sex marriages for £10,000 as it is easier to deceive officials at them than heterosexual weddings.

A journalist is filmed meeting her fake lover, who has a Romanian passport proving she is an EU citizen and the reporter can stay in the UK after they marry.

Young women – using EU passports – pose as lesbians to secure British citizenship for their fake ‘brides’, an undercover investigation reveals will reveal tomorrow.

One gang leader ‘Ricardo’ was filmed bragging how easy the scam is because registrars never grill same sex couples, even if they are suspicious.

Mark Rimmer, of registration and nationality services at Brent council, North West London, disagrees and says: “Registrars are not able to pick up on body language.”

A reporter was asked to pose for photos with her ‘bride-to-be’ in London’s Hyde Park, in scenes reminiscent of Hollywood movie ‘Green Card’ when Gerard Depardieu falls for Andie MacDowell as he fakes a relationship to get into America.

The undercover reporter was asked to use another bride for her ceremony because the first fake fiancee was too busy with another sham marriage.

In BBC’s Inside Out London, reporter “Ruby” from Mumbai wants to become a British citizen. Gang members demand £10,000 to arrange it.

Ricardo tells Ruby: “It’s very simple. You say, yeah, I’m gay. No more questions for you, then finished.”

Mr Rimmer admitted registrars are often too embarrassed to question same sex couples, even if they suspect them of being involved in fake ceremonies.

He said: “Many are concerned that they may say the wrong thing and end up red faced.

“I think it’s fair to say that registrars are very well experienced in looking for the signs where opposite sex couples are concerned.

“But it is much more difficult to spot the signs if you have a same sex couple whether it be male or female.”

Government figures suggest 10,000 sham marriages take place each year but there are no figures for those involving same sex couples.

Alison Cathcart, Superintendent Registrar, Westminster Council, admitted the gay fake wedding racket was ‘difficult to detect’.

James Brokenshire, Minister for Immigration and Security, promised immigration officials would investigate the Romanian gang.

This is what happens when you cast pearls before dogs and swine and allow brute beasts to join the Church.

Telegraph:

A vicar operated a fake marriage “conveyor belt” allowing nearly 500 illegal immigrants to stay in Britain, a court has heard.

Reverend Nathan Ntege, 55, is accused of conducting 494 fake marriages – an average of one every other day – at St Jude’s with St Aidan’s Church in Thornton Heath south London, between December 2007 and March 2011.

When the reverend took over the church, the number of weddings went from six a year in 2005 to six a day, prosecutor Edward Lucas told Inner London Crown Court.

Witnesses described brides queuing round the block. They changed into their wedding dresses in the garden or in the toilets and shared dresses with other women. Some women married, took of their wedding dresses in a back room and left without any ceremony, There were no guests.

Some wedding photographs showed a bride wearing a wedding dress that was far too small, so tight she was unable to do it up properly at the back, meaning her black bra was showing.

Mr Lucas said: “There were an inordinate number of marriages presided over by Ntege. In the period we are concerned with 494 sham marriages took place.”

“A church warden has said it went from six marriages a year to six marriages a day. In 2005 there were six marriages at the church, in 2010 there were 223.

“This involved EEA (European Economic Area) members marrying EEA non-members who had no right to stay in the UK or whose leave was about to expire. They married Bulgarian nationals who were sourced by fixers.

“This number of sham bogus marriages does not take place by coincidence, the persons wishing to take part in marriages could go there no questions asked.

“Ntege was integral to the process, without him no marriages could take place in the church. It was clear he had accomplices in this.

“He was part of this enterprise to conduct false marriages in the full knowledge he had betrayed the trust of law-abiding parishioners and the church which had placed trust in him.

“He also profited from the marriages. Between 31 Jan 2007 and 31 May 2011 he should have paid £72,498 to the Diocese of Southwark, instead he paid £3,000, so defrauding the diocese of £69,498. In that period he sent £50,000 to Uganda.”

Mr Lucas said: “The weddings were farcical. Ntege and his team ran a marriage conveyor belt.”

He added: “Brian Miller’s presence at the weddings lent them respectability, he knew full well the weddings were entirely bogus.

“The marriages were technically correct but morally bankrupt, he knew the marriages were weddings of convenience.

Poor Eastern European women are coming to the UK and then doing something gross for money?

Who could have ever seen that coming?

I’ll tell you who: no one.  At all.

Daily Mail:

Sham marriage is ‘spiralling out of control’ in Britain, with officials called in over bogus ceremonies nearly four times a day, an MPs’ report has revealed.

The Home Office Select Committee said that arrests over fake weddings have more than tripled in a single year, as the ‘precious institution’ of marriage is routinely ‘hijacked’ by foreigners intent on illegally entering Britain.

Their damning report accused the marriages – often between ‘away-day brides’ from Eastern Europe and men from outside the EU – of making a ‘mockery’ of our legal system.

And it said the Home Office is hopelessly unaware of the ‘alarming’ scale of the scandal, which represents a ‘significant threat’ to immigration control.

It is thought that as many as 10,000 out of 173,000 civil weddings each year in England and Wales are fake. A sham marriage does not just allow a non-EU national the right to stay in Britain, but also their children, grandchildren, parents and grandparents – piling extra pressure on public services.

Last year, immigration officials carried out 1,338 raids connected to sham marriages, up from 529 in 2012. The number arrested for taking part in a fake union more than tripled from 221 to 725 over the same period.

But remarkably, an ‘absurd’ legal loophole means that two people living in the UK can be married by proxy, without any ceremony actually taking place in this country. This means they can technically get married without leaving the UK, as long as they are ‘represented’ at their overseas wedding ceremony, usually by a family member.

Warning that the situation was ‘spiralling out of control,’ committee chairman Keith Vaz, a Labour MP, said: ‘There is an industry of deceit in the UK which uses sham marriages to circumvent immigration control.

‘Marriage is a precious institution and should not be hijacked to make a mockery of the law or our immigration system. We cannot afford for any town or city to become a back-door entry to our country.’

He added: ‘It is absurd that we accept marriages where the two parties do not attend the ceremony. This allows an easy ticket into the UK. This proxy marriage loophole must be closed immediately.’

Sham marriages are increasingly popular among immigrants because anyone who enters a bogus relationship successfully can use it to stay in Britain for five years and eventually obtain citizenship.

Under Brussels rules, they can then apply for permission to bring in their extended family.

Officials have found a growing number of Eastern European women are being paid to visit Britain for a few days and supposedly marry a man, then return alone to their home countries. Their fake husbands are mainly from Nigeria, Ghana, Brazil and Pakistan.

One of the joys of being a member of the EU is that citizens from other, less wealthy European countries can move to yours. Once there, they can then move all their family over and then claim all the welfare, health and education benefits that were originally intended only for your own kinsmen. As if this wasn’t bad enough, if the immigrant then goes and marries a Negro or a Pakistani, they can then move to your country too, with all their extended family following.

Obviously this state of affairs is very easily taken advantage of, as we see here with this case of two Bulgarian gypsies being hired online over Skype to move to Britain and then marry Non-White criminals in order to get them British passports.

From the Daily Mail:

Bulgarians Nadya Kamenova, 20, and Tamenuzhka Slavcheva, 21, were paid in total more than £4,000 to ‘marry’ two Pakistani men facing deportation.The young mothers were both flown to Manchester after being contacted online by sham marriage organisers.

Now both women have been jailed after admitting conspiring to facilitate breach of UK immigration law.

The women were locked up alongside fake groom, Muhammed Saleem, 28, who married Slavcheva in a ceremony observed by undercover borders officials, called in by suspicious staff, at Manchester Register Office last February.

Saleem, from Rochdale, Lancs, paid Slavcheva £1,000 to marry him after his student visa was rescinded.

Four days earlier, Saleem acted as a witness in the fake marriage of Mohammed Shahbaz to Nadya Kamenova.

Mr Shahbaz, who has so far escaped arrest, is suspected of organising a number of other sham marriages.

Manchester Crown Court heard that his bride Kamenova was recruited by her UK-based aunt, who is suspected of being another of the organisers, via Skype, and paid £3,400 for the job.

Once over here, Kamenova helped make arrangements for her cousin Slavcheva’s arrival

David Toal, prosecuting, said: ‘Before the accession of countries such as Bulgaria and Romania to the EU, most previous sham marriage cases involved “brides” from affluent countries like Holland, and invariably spent only a few days for the marriage in the UK before returning to their lives in their own country.

‘Such transient passage within the UK, gave the marriages the obvious appearance of shams.

‘By choosing brides from poor countries such as Bulgaria, the grooms could be confident that their brides would be more willing to remain within the UK for longer periods of time or come to the UK on repeated visits.’

Thousands of migrants are exploiting lax EU rules to bring their families and spouses to Britain by the back door.

Foreign nationals from outside Europe who would be unlikely to gain a visa to live or work in the UK are instead applying for citizenship elsewhere in the EU.

Under Brussels rules, they can then move to Britain and apply for permission to bring in their spouse or children.

Now a damning report by an immigration watchdog has found that the system is suffering ‘significant abuse’ at the hands of migrants who falsely claim they are related or married to a non-European living in the UK.

Yesterday, Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration John Vine called it a ‘growing problem’.

He said: ‘Our findings suggest the European citizenship route is becoming an increasingly important way into the UK for those whose origins lie outside the EEA [European Economic Area], particularly now that the immigration rules have been tightened.’ The report looked at more than 100 sample cases from the Home Office between April and September last year.

It found that more than a third of Western European nationals – 36 per cent – who were applying for citizenship for their partner were born in Africa, Asia or South America and had gained European citizenship before arriving in Britain.

In a quarter of cases the ‘sponsors’ – whose new nationalities included German, Italian and Spanish – were born in the same non-EU country as their partner.

In one case, a migrant who acquired Italian nationality before then moving to the UK received 97 per cent of his income from welfare handouts. Some 60 per cent of those applying for citizenship for a  so-called spouse last year failed because immigration officials feared the relationship was fake – but thousands still slip through the net.

Some had taken part in a sham marriage while in the UK and others claimed they had been wed by proxy, where a couple remain in Britain and both are represented at an overseas wedding ceremony, usually by family members. Most proxy marriages were found to be invalid, according to the report.

Read More

A bogus bride and groom have been jailed after rounding up guests for their sham wedding – from a local bus stop.

Uzoma Onwuha, 30, and Robert Horvath, 35 exchanged vows at Cardiff register office, in front of strangers they’d met on the way to their ceremony in Cardiff, Wales.

But Nigeria-born Onwuha had paid Horvath £1,000 to marry her so that she could get the necessary paperwork to stay in Britain.

Staff at the register office soon became suspicious because the ‘couple’ couldn’t give basic details about each other.

Later, a police investigation showed that one guest revealed that he was invited after the pair found him at a bus stop nearby.

Cardiff Crown court heard that as soon as their big day was over the newlyweds went their separate ways.

Onwuha caught a bus back to her home in London alone where she was arrested.

Meanwhile, Horvath was seized in a raid on his home in Newport, South Wales, where he was found living with another woman.

Prosecutor Jeremy Jenkins said: ‘There were only six guests at the wedding.

Read More

A corrupt lawyer boasted of using ‘b*******’ European human rights laws to keep immigrants in the UK illegally.

Nazakat Ali, 38, said he would use the controversial legislation to stop clients being deported while they waited for a sham marriage.

The father-of-four helped broker deals in which desperate Pakistani and Indian men paid up to £10,000 to marry Eastern Europeans.

But he was secretly recorded gloating that he also used human rights laws to help his ‘clients’ evade the authorities.

Asked what he put on official paperwork claiming removal from the UK would breach their right to a family life, he replied: ‘Just b*******.’

Yesterday, Ali was branded a disgrace to his profession and jailed for six years for his role in the sophisticated and lucrative scam.

Judge Mark Bishop said he was an arrogant man who traded on his reputation as someone who could ‘get around’ immigration controls.

He said: ‘As an officer of the court you have a duty to maintain the rule of law and uphold the integrity of the legal system – by your actions you were doing the exact opposite.

‘You were demonstrating a deep cynicism for the principles you plainly saw as expendable to get the result for your client that you wanted.’ Ali posed as a wealthy and successful self-made lawyer, running his own firm from offices in East London’s Upton Park.

He was a well-known as a generous member of the congregation at his local mosque and was urged to stand for election as a local councillor as a ‘role model’ for others.

But Inner London Crown Court heard he was secretly profiting from the misery of women smuggled into the UK and desperate immigrants on short-term visas.

The scam revolved around ‘certificates of approval’, in which non-European nationals had to ask border officials for permission to marry before applying for residency.

Ali charged up to £600 to complete the paperwork and ‘set the ball rolling’ for people who had exhausted every other route into the country.

The documentation was designed to convince officials at the UK Border Agency that the couple had met and fallen in love with the women.

Read More