Dodgy and incompetent immigration advisers

The IAA (Immigration Advice Authority), formerly the OISC, often reminds us that an important part of its function is to protect the public from poor immigration advice and services and from unregulated advisers. In the worst circumstances it has powers to strip registered advisers of their registration.

This happened in the recent past in connection with a firm called Anzan Immigration Lawyers, which was registered with the OISC as a firm allowed to provide immigration advice and services. Very importantly, this firm was registered as a “level 1” firm, which means that it was only allowed to provide advice and services in connection with certain types of visa application and British nationality applications; it was not allowed to deal with asylum claims. To deal with asylum claims a firm needs to be registered at at least level 2. 

A client of this firm, Mrs Odubela, paid them a lot of money in connection with her asylum claim; she was evidently unaware that they were not allowed to do this work and evidently they had not told her. This looks dodgy, to say the least, and it got even more dodgy when the firm initially tried to deny that she had paid them anything – although she was subsequently able to prove with documents that she had. Mrs Obudela also claimed that no work had been done on her case. 

She was not entirely happy and she made a complaint to the OISC, but then it got worse and worse. The OISC discovered that this firm had made various asylum applications over the course of several years, in some cases when they held no OISC registration at all – a sort of “double crime”. They also discovered that a person in the firm, the father of the registered adviser, had apparently been providing advice for Mrs Odubela but he was not a registered adviser himself and he had previously been prosecuted for providing unregulated advice, which did not look terribly good either. 

It emerged from the OISC’s investigation that in fact the firm had done some work for Mrs Odudela, ie they had prepared a statement in connection with her asylum claim – but of course this was not work that they were entitled to do, being only a level 1 firm. 

So the OISC was not entirely happy either, and especially after they had identified 19 breaches of the OISC rules by Anzan Immigration Lawyers – we wonder if this might be a record. Hardly surprisingly the firm was struck off the register of advice firms. 

In such a situation a firm or a person has the right of appeal, to the “First-Tier Tribunal (General Regulatory Chamber)”. But, like always, there is not necessarily much point in appealing if a case is hopelessly weak. In this case it was: Anzan Immigration Lawyers appealed but they did not succeed, and the Tribunal also ordered them to repay Mrs Odubela’s money. The Tribunal said, inter alia, that “The breaches of the Code were as extensive as they were serious.”

The moral of this story is, we suppose, be very careful whom you instruct in your immigration case and make sure that they are appropriately qualified and regulated. 

You will be comforted to know that GSN Immigration is qualified at level 3, which means that it can prepare asylum and human rights claims and it can also do other things like conducting immigration appeals.

Oliver Westmoreland

Senior Immigration Lawyer