Quiet country church became a marriage machine

With a congregation of 12 regulars, the 383 weddings at a Sussex parish attracted official attention. Photo / Getty Images

With its imposing red-brick walls, gently sloping grounds and long wooden knave, the church of St Peter and St Paul in St Leonards-on-Sea is as pretty a place as any to get hitched.

Boasting a congregation of just 12 regular churchgoers, the small parish in East Sussex would have considered itself lucky to host more than three weddings a year.

Yet between July 2005 and September last year, 383 couples walked up the aisle to trade rings in a flurry of local passion that, at one point, saw the resident vicar hosting a wedding daily.

What was it about St Peter's that made it such a romantic place? Was it the picturesque setting or something in the water? Sadly it was neither. The Victorian building was the epicentre of what police have described as the largest organised marriage scam ever uncovered in Britain.

Yesterday the three men behind the meticulously organised deception, including the church's seemingly law-abiding vicar, were facing jail after one of the largest police investigations into fraudulent marriages.

A jury at Lewes Crown Court decided that Vladymyr Buchak, a Ukrainian national, Michael Adelasoye, a Nigerian-born solicitor, and the Anglican vicar Alex Brown were all guilty of conspiring to breach Britain's immigration laws by organising hundreds of bogus weddings.

In the unremarkable church, hundreds of West Africans tied the knot with impoverished local East Europeans who were paid up to £3000 ($6500) to be a bride or husband for the day. Once the marriage was over the couples would go their separate ways, resurfacing to send in paperwork or attend immigration interviews.

Spouses of European nationals with working rights in Britain are usually granted permanent residency if they can prove they have been together for two years after their wedding.

For the Africans, most of whom were at risk of imminent deportation, marriage was the only way they could stay in the country permanently. What they needed was around £9000 in cash and an introduction to the unlikely multinational alliance of three men who were running the scam out of the quiet seaside town.

The go-to man for the Eastern Europeans was Buchak. The 33-year-old was thrown out of Sweden for cannabis use and had entered Britain illegally using false documents.

The West Africans entered the scam through Adelasoye, a 50-year-old immigration solicitor who lived locally and preached at the Ark of Hope evangelical church in Hastings.

Adelasoye had worked with West African immigrants for years and regularly met people desperate to stay in Britain. Most came from south London and had had their applications for asylum turned down or had visas that were about to expire.

But organising fake marriages on such a scale would have been impossible without a clergyman willing to turn a blind eye to the large number of couples knocking on his door.

In Alex Brown, the 61-year-old ruddy-faced Anglican vicar who ran St Paul's, Buchak and Adelasoye found their perfect partner in crime.

Brown had lived in St Leonards for more than a decade and was known as a friendly priest who enjoyed a cider in his local pub, The Railway.

Police are perplexed by his motives. Under interrogation and in court he simply said he was doing his job. If there was a sudden increase in couples wanting to get married, he said, his job was to marry them.

- THE INDEPENDENT