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Trio jailed for visa scam
3 Jun 2009An Indian solicitor and two women who both claim to be his wives were jailed today for the roles they played in the biggest visa scam ever seen in Britain.
Jatinder Kumar Sharma was sentenced to seven years and Rakhi Shahi was jailed for eight years for running a fraud factory where they helped hundreds of immigrants apply for visas using bogus documents and false identities.
Neelam Sharma was given a four-year term for money laundering after being found guilty of handling some of the hundreds of thousands of pounds which poured into the business. But the former teacher was cleared of conspiracy to defraud and immigration offences.
All three live together in Clarence Street, Southall, west London, and, while Neelam Sharma married Jatinder nearly 20 years ago, a marriage certificate appears to show that he also recently married Shahi.
Police say both marriages took place in India and the second would be illegal under Indian law.
Shahi and Jatinder Sharma ran an immigration consultancy business known as Univisas and amassed a mountain of 90,000 documents including false university certificates, fraudulent academic records, bogus bank statements and payslips.
They also kept passports, 50 different types of headed notepaper and 150 ink stamps which were all used to create fake documents to support visa applications.
Passing sentence at Isleworth Crown Court, Judge Richard McGregor-Johnson said the pair had exploited "weaknesses" in the checks made by the Home Office.
"Various criticisms have been made of the actions of the agencies responsible for checking those documents. Those criticisms are plainly well founded in my view. The checks were woefully inadequate and frequently non-existent.
"You saw the weaknesses in those systems and dishonestly exploited them."
The court had earlier heard that Home Office employees had failed to spot that employment certificates from across India were almost identical and that wage slips did not add up.
In some cases students appeared to have attended two full-time courses simultaneously, many people gave an identical address on their application and one appeared to change sex midway through the process.
