Bent lawyer ordered to pay back cash from passport scam

11:24am Thursday 13th October 2005

38-year-old solicitor from Enfield who was jailed for nine years for forging dozens of immigration documents for Romanian nationals has been stripped of £650,000.

Chris Christodoulides, of Arnold Avenue East, Enfield, is thought to have made £1.2million from his criminal activities which he carried out between January 2001 and August 2004.

Judge Timothy Stow gave Christodoulides a year to pay or face a further three years imprisonment on top of the sentence he is already serving.

Christodoulides forged birth certificates, criminal records and bank statements, charging £2,000 a time for doing the paperwork and helping to guarantee his clients' entry.

In one case, he forged the documents for a man convicted of murder in Romania by removing the trace of his conviction and so removing an objection to his entry into the UK.

Christodoulides, who had offices in east London and Romania, handed in large quantities of bogus applications to the British Embassy in Bucharest between 2001 and 2004.

The criminal activity was reported by a member of the British Embassy in Bucharest, prompting the investigation.

He was sentenced to seven-and- a-half years imprisonment for conspiring to defraud the Secretary of State for the Home Office and seven- and-a-half years for conspiring to facilitate illegal entry, to run concurrently, when he appeared before Croydon Crown Court in April.

In addition, he was jailed for one and a half years for attempting to pervert the course of justice, to run consecutively.

It followed a lengthy joint investigation by officers from Operation MAXIM, Operation Reflex and Romanian authorities into abuses of the European Community Association Agreement's Visa system.

DCI Bob Murrill, from Operation Maxim, said: "This is an excellent example of how the police and courts are making every effort to ensure that criminals no longer profit from their crimes."

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