Immigration clients plead innocence
Former clients of a B.C. consultant convicted of one of the biggest immigration scams in Canadian history insist they had no knowledge of his fraudulent activity, but the federal government says they are “far from being victims.”
The legal battle currently brewing in Federal Court could have huge implications for potentially hundreds of Chinese immigrants who had hired Xun “Sunny” Wang, an unlicensed immigration consultant, to obtain Canadian citizenship or permanent resident status.
Wang, who operated New Can Consultants Ltd. and Wellong International Investments Ltd. out of offices in Vancouver and Richmond, B.C., was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2015 and fined $900,000 after pleading guilty to fraud-related charges. The scam involved making it appear as if his clients had spent the requisite number of days in Canada when, in fact, they had not.
To pull that off, clients’ passports were altered — typically by adding fake exit and entry stamps. To further the impression some of his clients were living in Canada, fake letters of employment or school admission letters were created.
Three of Wang’s staff also received jail time and fines for their involvement in the elaborate scheme.
At the time, the Canada Border Services Agency said it was “the single largest investigation of immigration fraud in British Columbia’s history” and noted that some 1,600 clients had paid Wang about $10 million for fraudulent services.
In the aftermath, investigators with CBSA’s Inland Enforcement Section pored through the list of Wang’s clients to identify those who misrepresented themselves in order to obtain or maintain permanent resident status in Canada. More than 500 were flagged for possible inadmissibility. According to immigration lawyer Lawrence Wong, many subsequently received removal orders, some living outside Canada simply gave up their permanent resident status, while others are awaiting hearings or appeals. Only a handful have successfully appealed on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.
Wong believes the government has been unfairly lumping together individuals who knowingly conspired with Wang and those who were unaware of the fraud.
“You treat all his victims as if they were complicit? That doesn’t make sense,” Wong said Wednesday. “Effort has to be made to separate those that were complicit and weren’t complicit.”
Earlier this year, Wong went to Federal Court to file an application on behalf of two of Wang’s former clients — Chao Yuan Lin and Xiang Zhou — whose admissibility to Canada are being challenged. (Lin and Zhou, permanent residents of Canada since 2000 and 2004 respectively, had hired Wang to help them renew their permanent resident cards).
Wong is asking the court to declare that the government has misapplied the law.
“Despite the mountain of evidence of Mr. Wang’s fraudulent activities committed against his clients,” the federal government chose to treat those clients “as no less culpable and has been seeking to remove them from Canada by alleging they committed misrepresentation,” he wrote in the application.
If the government is successful at removing Lin, Zhou and other former clients of Wang from Canada, “the consequences could be devastating as many of these clients have Canadian spouses or Canadian-born young children.”
But in an aggressively worded response filed this month, federal lawyers said the applicants were “clearly complicit in the fraud against the immigration system and as such, do not come to this court with clean hands.”
They allege the applicants “chose to retain an unscrupulous consultant expressly for the purpose of misleading Canadian immigration authorities into believing that they maintained the required two years out of five residency … while they resided actually in China.”
“Whether they knew the consultant’s actual machinations or the exact nature of his scheme is irrelevant; they stood to benefit significantly from them, and now seek to maintain that benefit by suggesting that they are innocent victims.”
At the very least, the applicants were wilfully blind to what was going on, the government’s lawyers write.
Meanwhile, Wang, who is in late 40s, is no longer in custody after being granted full parole in late 2017, records show. In its decision, the parole board said while it was concerned about the “depth and breadth” of his offences and suspicious that he was hiding money and avoiding paying his fines, Wang was a first-time federal offender with no known ties to organized crime or violence.
He was released on condition that he not associate with anyone believed to be involved in criminal activity; allows his parole supervisor to keep tabs on his finances; and remains employed or goes back to school.
“You must learn to earn legitimately for yourself,” the parole decision said.
SEPARATE THOSE THAT WERE COMPLICIT AND WEREN’T.