A Czech national flew to Pakistan three times in four months as part of an elaborate immigration scam to allow Pakistani men to live in the UK, a British court heard on Friday.
According to a report in the Daily Mail, Eva Holubova, 19, flew to Pakistan with her boyfriend, also 19, to take part in fake marriage ceremonies and was ‘married’ three times in the space of four months. She told police Pakistani men offered her £250 for photos to pretend they were married so they could get visas to go to the UK.
Her boyfriend Peter Pohodko, from Slovakia, also took part in the scam and was paid £300 for ‘marrying’ a 28-year-old Pakistani woman he claimed to have met on his wedding day. Miss Holubova was among more than 20 Czech or Slovak brides flown to Pakistan by a sham marriage gang based in Rotherham, South Yorkshire that set up fake weddings to dupe immigration services into letting Pakistani men into the UK.
The phoney weddings were staged in Pakistan with ‘brides’ posing with their ‘grooms’ for photographs suggesting that they had got married.
One woman returned to the UK with £1,000 in her bag while another who went through a sham marriage already had a husband in the UK.
As overseas nationals, the Pakistanis would have been granted leave to live in the UK as ‘husbands’ of their spouses who, as EU citizens had the right to live and work in the country.
The scam was discovered by staff at the British High Commission in Islamabad when they noticed the multiple documents supporting applications to marry and to settle in the UK were forged.
Immigration officers discovered the sham weddings took place in various private homes throughout the Mirpur district in the south-west of the Kashmir region. The ceremonies often married within hours or a few days of meeting one another. Operation Razorback led to 18 men and women being convicted after trial or admitting conspiring to breach the UK’s immigration laws or assisting unlawful immigration between August, 2009 and September, 2010.
Prosecutor Sarah Wright told Sheffield Crown Court it was a sophisticated conspiracy. She said: ‘This was a huge, well-organised and professional operation.’ She said the brides had no intention of living in ‘settled and genuine relationships’ with the men and the sham marriages were clearly undertaken for immigration purposes.
A total of 62 fraudulent visa applications were traced to 32 addresses in the UK and the trail of false documents led to a semi-detached house in Rotherham where the main organisers, brothers Talib Hussain, 41, and Tariq Mehmood, 27, along with Talib’s ex-wife Rahina Zaman, 32 lived. Mehmood is now on the run.
Another feather in Pakistan's cap.
It is funny. The East India Company did not even have marriage certificates when it came to Indian subcontinent.
I think Pakistani did not want to be left behind.
It must have been an expensive sham marriage project.
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