Registry office workers in Shropshire raised the alarm after becoming concerned at the antics of Avtar Singh and his Czech 'bride'.
Singh, 38, was already married but needed an EU bride to stay in the country so agreed to pay to marry the mystery Eastern European.
Describing the wedding, registrar Paul Ainscough said: “The hem of the bride’s dress was soiled and she wore it without any deportment or sense of occasion.”
Fixer Robert Miko pocketed thousands of pounds by setting men like Singh up with Czech brides so they could tie the knot.
Another man, Hamid Mushtaq, wed Pavlina Kratka in a near-empty registry office with Miko as one of the guests. After a reception at KFC the newlyweds genuinely fell in love - and were in bed together when immigration officials swooped on their flat a year later. The couple were jailed for 18 months at Manchester Crown Court last Friday after being convicted of conspiring to assist unlawful immigration by arranging a sham marriage.
The fixers ran an international ‘delivery service’ in 2012 and 2013, shipping Czech women to the UK so they could marry ‘overstayers’.
Bogus groom Singh was locked up for 12 months. Members of the gang who arranged the fake marriages, most from Manchester, were jailed for between 16 months and five years.
Meanwhile the Home Office has been accused of failing to act on official warnings of bogus marriages. Three quarters of reports about alleged sham marriages result in no action being taken, according to a survey of registrars.
Registrars who send details to the Home Office of suspect marriages rarely receive any feedback on whether the allegation was investigated. Results from an online survey of registrars showed that of 879 reports that a planned marriage might be bogus, registrars knew of action being taken to investigate or stop the wedding in only 213 cases.
The Home Office provided feedback in only 51 of the reports sent in from 14 register offices, according to the survey. It found that 323 suspected sham marriages were reported in Manchester between 2013 and the summer of 2014; 181 in Harrow, north London; 143 in Liverpool; and 41 in Oxfordshire.
There were large disparities over time, with none being reported in Manchester in 2011 and 2012, followed by 166 and 157 in the two subsequent years.
In Harrow, no sham marriages were reported in 2011, while there were 37 in 2012 and 124 in 2013. Last year John Vine, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, said that no reports about suspected marriages were being made in some big cities. He did not identify the areas for fear that it would displace criminal activity from one city to another.
Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, said the findings from the online survey showed that the government must act. “Sham marriages in the UK have become a postcode lottery,” he said.
He continued: “There is significant under-reporting in some areas. There are three easy ways to stamp out this practice: better training for registrars; giving them the power to stop marriages that they suspect are sham; and making it a criminal offence for people who arrange these marriages for profit.”
Registrars have a duty to report to the Home Office when they have reasonable grounds to suspect that a marriage is being entered in to solely to enable one of the parties the right of access to the UK. Official figures put the number of reports in 2013 at 2,135, although some registrars believe that the actual figure is much higher.
Mark Rimmer, director of registrars service at Brent council in north London, said: “We hugely underestimate [sham marriages].”
He added that the Home Office’s failure to provide feedback about what action had been taken on warnings about suspect marriages had made registrars think there was little point in reporting their suspicions.
A Home Office spokesman said: “There are a number of reasons why numbers vary, but we are cracking down on sham marriages wherever we find them. In 2013-14 we intervened in more than 1,300 suspected sham marriages — more than double the number of the previous year.”
In April rules come into force under which the notice period for marriage and civil partnerships will be extended from 15 days to 28 days, with aim of giving the authorities more time to investigate suspect sham weddings.
