Gangs ‘using law firms to pay doctors for notes that will block deportations’

LAW firms with links to criminal gangs are paying medical professionals to help frustrate deportation efforts by the Home Office.

Sources told the Mail of extensive evidence of lawyers obtaining questionable ‘medico-legal’ reports on their clients.

Psychotherapists and psychologists with ‘tenuous’ qualifications are paid to write the reports claiming Albanians, in particular, are too mentally fragile to be interviewed or detained by the Home Office. Officials are working to combat the firms, and even get them shut down.

A source said: ‘It tends to be very much smaller firms of legal representatives and immigration advisers who are involved in some sort of criminal nexus. What we established was that the Albanians involved were paying those law firms who then pay for certain medical practitioners to produce that report. There are certain law firms that we helped the regulators investigate and put out of business.

‘They tend to be at the small end of the spectrum, but there are six or seven of these firms that are still very prevalent in this space.’ Some legal advisers whose companies have been closed have been able to simply restart under a new name due to gaps in the legal regulation process, it is understood.

In other cases legal privilege – the confidentiality between a lawyer and their client – has been used to block Home Office investigations. In one startling case, a relative of a detained Albanian national wrote to the Home Office setting out how they had paid £5,000 to a law firm to get them freed.

Incredibly, they complained about the failure to secure their relative’s release and even named the law firm involved. The letter provided crucial hard evidence for further investigations into the firm, it is understood.

The Home Office has tightened up the rules on medico-legal reports, including who can write them, and can now ask for a second opinion from an officially appointed doctor.

Only one in 50 cases of modern slavery reported to police last year led to a suspect being charged, it has emerged. Out of 9,349 cases recorded in the 12 months to March, police charged a suspect in only 214, The Times reported. In 4,869 cases, police closed the investigation with no suspect being identified.