Uncovered: Britain’s Largest Wedding Immigration Scam
The UK’s biggest immigration fraud has been discovered by investigators recently. Between July 2005 and September 2009 over 380 false marriages were conducted in order to allow people to gain visas that let them live in Britain. A small church in St Leonards-on-sea is where they took place.
When the case went to court the jury agreed that Ukranian national Vladymyr Buchak and his Nigerian born accomplice Michael Adelasoye were guilty of arranging hundreds of marriages for immigration purposes, along with the church vicar Alex Green. They have all been found guilty of breeching immigration laws.
The hundreds of African nationals got married to eastern Europeans living in Britain with the European’s being paid 3000 to pretend to be the bride or groom on the wedding day.
The current British immigration laws state that the husbands and wives of European nationals living in the UL with working rights are usually allowed to gain permanent residency so long as they have lived together for two years. The couples involved in the sham weddings were not doing this as they parted ways after the wedding was conducted.
Officers conducted a thorough search of the church and found that Green had kept registers with the details of each ceremony he conducted over the last nine years. The figures are startling as between the period of August 2001 and July 2005 only thirteen weddings were conducted whereas between July 2005 and September 2009 383 were conducted.
Police have suggested that only thirteen of the marriages conducted in this time period were actually genuine. Couples involved have disappeared now and are being traced by police wherever possible.
During the trial Brown claimed that he was unaware of the marriages being false. The court put it to him that he must have realised that something untoward was happening when the amount of marriages he conducted went through the roof. The church was set in a predominantly white area but after the influx of weddings it soon became an extremely multi cultural area.
The CPS have admitted that the case is one of the largest immigration- wedding cases ever in Britain.
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