Open Britain Part 1,936

From the BBC. Fair play to them. Monday's Panorama may actually be worth a look. But is this news going to suprise anyone ?

It took me just five months to get 20 fake EU passports.

Some of them were of the very best quality and were unlikely to be spotted as fakes by even the most stringent of border controls.

This meant that once in the UK I could start a new life with somebody else's identity, find work, open a bank account and eventually become a British citizen.

I met many immigrants in the UK on fake identities and passports.

Many of them were here only for work, but I also met quite a few dodgy characters who are dealing with banking scams and benefit fraud.

What, like this chap ?

When police, immigration officials and benefits investigators arrested him in December 2005 they found an Aladdin's cave of crime-related items.

These included more than 35 forged credit cards and 30 passports, numerous envelopes stuffed with hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash and two copies of Home Office stamps used to allow immigrants permission to stay in Britain.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds were found to have passed through bank and building society accounts in his name and those of his wife, children and immediate family.

In one Westminster bank account alone funds totalling £555,474.96 were cleared shortly before his arrest and another Halifax account saw transfers totalling £267,000.

In all he had at least 13 different bank accounts.

Investigators believe Nawaz Sharif was charging illegal immigrants between £2,000 and £5,000 to mark their passports with the counterfeit stamp. This allowed them to remain in the country illegally after they had been "doctored" by Sharif.

Sharif arrived in the late eighties as a taxi driver, and has been 'unemployed' for the last 11 years. His five year sentence will be two and a half years - in an English prison. For two million quid I'd do his sentence myself and think it well worth it.