Jail For 'College' Fraudsters

Four foreign nationals who ran a bogus UK college purporting to offer immigrants a gateway into the country have been jailed.

The criminals also run a corrupt immigration advisory firm, which, along with the fraudulent qualifications, netted them millions of pounds.

Chinese nationals 30-year-olds Junjie Kao and Wie Xing, along with Bangladeshi national Khaled Mahmud, 35, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration.

All three were sentenced to seven years imprisonment.

Tareq Mahmud, 35, also a Bangladeshi, was found guilty after a trial at Croydon Crown Court and was sentenced to four years imprisonment.

Junjie Kao and Wei Xing also pleaded guilty to money laundering after £2.65m in cash was discovered underneath their bed in the flat they shared in Rotherhithe, south east London.

They were sentenced to a further four years each, to be served concurrently.

At the heart of the gang's conspiracy was a bogus college which they set up, purporting to offer genuine courses of education, but in fact offering none.

For payments sometimes amounting to thousands of pounds, the gang provided fake documents and certificates to allow their 'clients' to gain visas to stay in the UK.

The gang also set up a legal services company, which claimed to provide advice to students from China and the Far East who wanted to extend their visas, and helped prepare immigration applications, which were then supported by the false documents they had manufactured.

The whole operation is thought to have netted them in excess of £4.5m.

Inspector Alexis Ttaris, of the Joint Immigration Crime Team, said: "This was an extremely complex 18-month investigation that involved many thousands of pages of documentary evidence.

"The amount of cash seized from underneath the bed of the defendants - which we believe is the largest single cash seizure at one time by a UK police force - only highlights the attraction that immigration crime has for criminal gangs and importance of our joint agency approach."

The UK Border Agency will now seek to deport the four from the country once their sentences have been served.

(PR/GK)