Please advise:Admin Review Refusal on Flimsy Gr for T1Entrep

Dear members
I applied for tier 1 entrepreneur visa from India which was rejected on the basis that ECO could not verify the details of legal representative who validated the declarations from 3rd parties for 3rd party funding, comments from ECO were:

"Paragraph 72 of the Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) guidance states in order to demonstrate third party funds you must submit a letter from a solicitor who is registered to practice legally. You have presented a letter from a Mr XX who is stated to be authorised by the Bar Council of YYY state. Reasonable enquiries were made detailed in the attached document verification report; However the Bar Council of YYY declined our request for verification of Mr XX's credential. Given the above I am not satisfied that the third party funds you have claimed are actually available to you"

Few things thing I would like to highlight here are

(a) ECO neither contacted my UK based immigration lawyer for any clarification despite him sending an email in this regard whilst the visa application under process nor the solicitor in India who authorised the 3rd party declaration to verify his credentials.

(b) No contact was made with 3rd parties or their banks for 3rd party funding provided to me for my visa application.

(c) No verification report was provided with the refusal letter as stated in the same.


After discussing this with my immigration solicitor we filed for an Admin Review which is also rejected & below is the response received from reviewer.

Response of Administrative Reviewer

"You applied for entry clearance to the United Kingdom under Tier 4 (general) of the PBS. Your application failed to meet the qualifying criteria and was refused. You have stated that the ECO failed to properly consider evidence submitted with the application. However, I have reviewed your application and I am satisfied that the decision to refuse you entry clearance was correct.

Your solicitors have raised two points:
1) The reasons for undertaking the verification checks.

2) The Document Verification report was not made available.

The ECO was concerned that your State Bank of India statements were not of the appearance regularly encountered. There are many regional variations on Indian documents but the only way to check their veracity is by a verification check. Once the ECO has decided to check a particular document it is common practice to check others as experience shows that fraudulent applications often have more than one suspect document.

In your case the bank statements were found to be genuine but the letter you submitted from legal representative for 3rd party declaration could not be verified with the relevant authority. I enclose the redacted Verification report.

Lastly I would like to point out that the ECO stated in the refusal “, as detailed in a document verification report attached to your application.â€

I can't really advise on all the details of whether the rejection was valid or not. But if a Judicial Review is the only remaining option to you, and you want to pursue it, I would go ahead with the following advice

1 – find a solicitor who has done them before, preferably in a case similar to yours (the latter bit won’t be easy). I used Johns & Saggar (Khalid Sofi specifically) in my JR. They were fine but we (they) arguably made some mistakes in the advice I was given. Anyway, they are lessons learnt now. Read on for more info:

2 – Don’t hang around for too long as requesting a JR is only permitted within a limited time frame

3 – JRs are expensive. You can get your money back, but you need to make this super-ultra clear to the solicitor, that at all costs you must recoop your legal expenses back. The mistake J&S made (they’ll argue differently) was that we allowed the Home Office to worm they way into a situation that made it impossible for us to continue with the JR & thus go after my legal fees. As soon as the docs have been submitted for the JR, and if the Home Office, or whoever, then wants to negotiate, make sure you ensure you have sufficient wording in your agreements which mean that if they back down, they pay your costs back in full. If you don’t you’ll never get the money back from them and like I said, JRs are expensive. I spent around £10k for mine, and I didn’t even go to a single hearing… Negotiating is easy for the solicitors when you have a strong case and you don’t make obligatory demands for costs.

4 – research and get the solicitors to instruct a barrister that YOU choose. You can see who is rated best for your issue (immigration & employment I guess) by going on to Chambers & Partners, as well as Legal 500. I am always suspect with solicitors “recommendingâ€

See also JR.

My feeling is that the verification standards should set be very high, else their failure to verify may imply that applicant used deception.

Claiming damages is not restricted to British citizens.

Thanks very much Gino & Vinny for your reply.

@ Vinny

In my case they refused on the basis that they could not verify whether the solicitor assisting with 3rd party declaration was registered with Bar Council, hence the outcome of that particular check was inconclusive.

With my admin review I submitted a letter issued by local bar association confirming the solicitor's registration with bar council, also provided was a copy of his ID card issued by Bar council itself.

Further in their admin review refusal letter they made silly mistakes like mentioning Tier 4 General when it is T1 Entrep. as well as using incorrect gender for me, plus they said that I did not provide any evidence from independent body to support the verification when I did provide the above documents.

Can you please advise me on couple of things

(1) Should I highlight the above & request them to reconsider the admin review, I mean is it possible to do so i.e. review of admin review.

(2) I have since then managed to arrange the funds required for Tier 1 Entrepreneur by selling property etc, so should I reapply by showing all the funds in my account with no 3rd party declaration requirement, cost of this is £800 , however would they not question that why didn't I do that in first instance.

Regards
Ohm

have no idea about this "admin review". Like I said before, you've limited time in which you can submit a JR. Miss the deadline and you can kiss goodbye to anything you could do going down that route..

I'd work out deadlines first and if you've time to submit an admin review, fine do it - but if they're still considering the admin review, and you're very close to the JR deadline, I'd probably also submit the JR docs otherwise you'll be stuck should you get another rejection. So prepare them.

Btw, the first step in a JR is simply writing a letter threatening them of intended action. If you can't get them reconsider off the back of the letter you have to meet the deadline for submitting JR docs to court

Hi,

I would suggest two things;

1. Make a chronological event numbered as an when things happened explaining from where you started and present situation.
Do not make a bunch of your application and send it to the address below, just a letter by FAX will do. Keep safe the fax receipt. You can also write to them if you want but i understand that you are placed in India. Postal delivery will take at least 9 days to reach, thus faxing is a quicker option.

Address: International Group Visa Customers Services
Visa Services Directorate
International Group UKBA
c/o Lunar House
40 Wellesley Road
Croydon
CR9 2BY

Fax: 0870 336 9240
Email: visacomplaints@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

Do not send them the copy of entire bunch your posted and received back as they have and will obtain it from the Diplomatic post. You can include necessary reference numbers and dates along with the diplomatic post you applied at and the Directorate will be happy to dig up the case from his end and collect the application with paperwork that you submitted at the post.
In all my previous cases, he has been happy to reverse the decision even after the administrative review has been upheld by the ECM. This department is higher authorities in Croydon.

2. Judicial review. It will take time.

Which would come be expensive. I would rather advise to submit a fresh application if application fees to be paid is not of a much concern.

I am sure Lunar House will be able to help reverse the decision.

Good luck!
spammer