Another Immigration Investigation Underway

The Penner immigration corruption scandal which dominated the public landscape for a year has now fizzled. But with Immigration such a ripe tree full of fruit to plunder, there will always be corruption. In fact, reports reaching our newsroom indicate that at least one senior Immigration Officer is currently under investigation for facilitating the extension of passports for Chinese nationals who are currently not even in the country. We are told that the facilitation, so to speak, happened at the Benque office, and today we asked Minister of Immigration Godwin Hulse about it.

Godwin Hulse, Minister of Immigration & Labour

“It’s not facilitating passports for people. We have several officers that we continue, whenever we have these reports, we continue to investigate. I can say no more at this stage because we haven’t gotten a final report back. But there are several officers who, whenever something happens that is not protocol, you know our stand is zero tolerance and we will investigate them. And if the evidence is substantial we will put them before the Public Service Commission again.”

Mike Rudon

Godwin Hulse

“Could you clarify for us the nature of the allegation?”

Godwin Hulse

“Well at this point in time, it is not something that I can and will clarify because as I said, the investigation has not been fully completed. But we had information that certain persons were being facilitated by an immigration officer and that’s why we are looking into it. It never came to fruition thank god because the systems are in place now to check and to catch along the way anything that may happen, but it doesn’t mean that people won’t try.”

We also took the opportunity to ask Hulse about Nationality Section senior officials Ady Pacheco and Gordon Wade. Seven months ago they were fingered in the Penner matter, and even named specifically in an internal investigation. We are reliably informed that they both threatened to disclose very flammable knowledge if touched. Today Hulse confirmed that they have not been touched.