– written by ContractorUK An IT company was the front for a £500,000 immigration scam that allowed 175 workers from Pakistan to illegally enter Britain, it emerged this week. According to reports, Techsense UK told immigration officials that it needed staff at its Islamabad unit to join its Milton Keynes base, to help it fulfil a set of lucrative IT contracts. Although an immigration inspector had already raised red flags, having visited the unit in Pakistan, the alert by the Borders Agency (BA) did not reach its replacement, the Border Force. So a licence granted to Techsense UK to sponsor immigrants for work visas was not taken off the company, which told officials it was being used to staff-up for UK-based tech projects . Microsoft, BT, IBM and the NHS were cited by the company as clients, but in fact all it had from the four were print-outs of ‘welcome’ messages from signing up to their online services. Nonetheless, the loss-making company convinced the Border Force that the arrivals from its Islamabad office were needed to work in highly-skilled £40,000-a-year IT jobs, based in Milton Keynes. Yet many of the 117 certificates issued by the BA to the firm (between 2009 and 2012) led to Pakistanis entering the UK to actually work in fast food restaurants and supermarkets. Presiding at Oxford Crown Court, Judge Peter Ross blasted the immigration authorities as much as he condemned Techsense’s two directors, Ali Junejo and Rashid Ghauri. The judge said: “It is a scandal that no one checked with the organisations that were supposedly contracting with Techsense…It would have been so easy but everything was just taken on the nod.” The court heard that 55 visas were secured by the company for Pakistani nationals, in addition to an estimated 120 visas for their family members and dependents. Ghauri and Junejo, who are also Pakistani nationals, were said to have pocketed at least £500,000 between them, from selling the work permits for between £3,500 and £4,500. For their “financially motivated” scheme, Ghauri was handed a six-year jail sentence for fraud and money laundering, while Junejo received six-and-a-half years for the same offences, the court heard. Both based in Milton Keynes, the pair and their scam were exposed by an unrelated tax investigation by HM Revenue & Customs. The two men have since been handed 15-year bans from being UK company directors.
