Nigerian Groom Jailed In The UK As Bride Forget His Name In Fake Marriage Plot

A Nigerian groom has been jailed for 12 months for a sham marriage.

Hull University masters student Jayeola Abiola, 29, needed to marry to stay in the UK, and paid Portuguese Vania Pinheiro-Fernandes, 29, to be his bride.

 

The couple whose sham marriage was scuppered after the bride could not remember the groom’s name have been jailed. Jayeola Abiola, 27, a Nigerian national, barely knew his would-be wife Vania Pinheiro-Fernandes, 29, from Portugal. They planned to walk down the aisle to the ballad The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – a choice Hull crown court heard was “rather apt”.

Abiola agreed to pay £5,000 for the sham marriage so he could get a visa to stay in the UK, the court heard.

But the ceremony at Hull’s Guildhall was halted because a registrar became suspicious that Fernandes struggled with basic questions about her purported partner, and tipped off immigration officers.

'A lot of sham marriages are arranged to allow people to stay in the country legally and that is the major reason people try to arrange these and why people are willing to act illegally to do so,' he said. 

'Criminals who organise these fake weddings do so for a monetary benefit, sometimes thousands of pounds, and our worries are that the money raised from this could be used to possibly fund other areas of crime.

'Fake passports and documentation are used to try and pull the wool over the authority’s eyes.
'They often involve non-EU citizens who seek illegal assistance to get married in order to stay in this country.'