Quebec Muslim immigration consultant arrested
The RCMP has arrested a Quebec immigration consultant accused of providing Canadian citizenship documents to hundreds of people in the Middle East so they could collect benefits and tax refunds from Ottawa.
Ahmad El-Akhal, 62, was arrested Thursday morning following a 2-1/2-year investigation by the RCMP’s Immigration and Passport and Commercial Crimes sections. His wife was also arrested as well as a suspected accomplice in Mississauga.
The alleged fraud ring is accused of securing immigrant status and citizenship for more than 300 residents of Lebanon and other Middle East countries and then helping them bilk the Canadian government of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Once they received documents this guy would fill out the tax returns and documents to get benefits back in the names of these people,” said RCMP Sgt. Marc LaPorte. “They were getting tax refunds, Goods and Services Tax rebates, child credit tax benefits, so the whole gamut.”
Also charged was Mississauga resident Hassan Ali Saif, 44, who faces three charges under the Citizenship Act. “He was the leasor of some of the residences. And also he forged lease agreements and created mail addresses for these people. He actually collected the mail and gathered the information and sent it back to Montreal,” Sgt. LaPorte said….
The alleged crimes go back as far as 1999. The investigation began in 2008 after Citizenship and Immigration Canada noticed that 320 permanent residence applicants had given the same 29 home addresses in Canada.
“The RCMP alleges that several hundred foreign nationals not residing in Canada used fraudulent means to obtain Canadian Citizenship and Canadian travel documents,” the RCMP said in a statement Thursday afternoon.
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I remember seineg a show quite a few years ago that was a sort of expose about the civil servants who are supposed to find illegals and deport them. They have to meet a quota and deport a certain number of people every month. So what they do is go after people who are easy to find–people who use their real names and don’t keep changing addresses. Most of the people they deport seem to be stable, honest people who have over stayed their visa for some reason. The real criminals keep changing their names and moving around, so they are hard to find. It would be too much work to find them, so they seldom get deported.