Bride tricked into marriage for residency

By TONY WALL

Some of the New Zealand brides caught up in a marriage-for-residency racket exposed by the Weekend Herald may be unaware they are being used.

A South Auckland woman married a Sri Lankan man thinking it was for love, only to discover that he was part of the scam and planned to leave her as soon as his New Zealand residency came through.

The incident suggests participants in the racket have tricked some of the brides to give the marriages a greater chance of seeming genuine to immigration authorities.

Immigration Minister Lianne Dalziel said she was aware of other cases where "extremely vulnerable New Zealanders" had been targeted by people using marriage solely as a mechanism for gaining residence.

"I want to take the opportunity to warn people again that ... they should always ask questions. I'm amazed sometimes by people who marry without knowing the full background of the person."

The latest racket targets mainly women in their 20s and 30s, such as single mothers and beneficiaries, setting them up with Indian men hoping to gain residency on marriage grounds. The brides have been promised up to $20,000.

Participants say the organiser is Otara woman Samshad Beggum, known as "the wedding planner".

During its investigations, the Herald learned of a young woman who was approached on the street in the Otara town centre by a Sri Lankan man who struck up a conversation with her.

They hit it off and started going out, and he took her back to Sri Lanka to meet his family. The pair later married at the Manukau registry office. At one point the man introduced his bride to Ms Beggum.

Late last year the woman discovered through a friend that her husband had paid thousands of dollars to Ms Beggum for help with immigration matters and planned to leave her as soon as his residency came through. Devastated, she left him and is now living in another town.

A friend of the woman said he went to Ms Beggum's home to confront her. He lost his temper and there was an angry exchange.

It appears that the Immigration Service's four-person fraud team has yet to investigate the racket. Ms Beggum says no one from Immigration has questioned her, only a Work and Income NZ officer investigating unexplained income.

She denies ever having arranged marriages for money.

Immigration Service spokesman Ian Smith said the service was always willing to investigate sham marriages, "but it is extremely difficult to do so without the names of the parties involved".

He said the service did investigate a marriage-for-residency racket targeting homeless people, exposed by the Herald in 2001.

"But your decision not to give the service the names of the people who were married made it all but impossible to identify those involved and take the matter any further."

The paper's policy is to protect the identity of sources who supply information in confidence. Not to do so would limit its ability to make future inquiries into breaches of law or public service failures to enforce regulations.

Lianne Dalziel claimed other media had helped track people down in similar circumstances.

"But you obviously don't care that someone who is prepared to lie and cheat the system becomes a New Zealand resident," she told the Herald.

National Party immigration spokesman Murray McCully said he found it difficult to accept that the minister and her officials could not launch an investigation based on what was now in the public arena.

"It makes an absolute mockery of the law ... I would have thought the Immigration Service and potentially the police would have had plenty of authority to conduct the necessary inquiries."

Herald feature: Immigration