Mahira Rustam al-Azawi - Iraqi asylum seeker jailed for three years in massive benefits fraud

Not to mention a university education for herself and private schooling for her son. More celebration of diversity and enjoyment of the fruits of Cultural Enrichment™, this time from Britain’s ‘ethical’ asylum policy:

An asylum seeker bought three homes and sent her son to a fee-paying school by illegally claiming more than £700,000 in benefits, a court heard.

Mahira Rustam Al-Azawi, 49, used a series of false identities to milk Britain’s lax benefit system over eight years. Although she never worked, she was able to purchase three properties – two of which she rented out – worth in excess of £1million.

Her 18-year-old son was educated at Colfe’s School, in South-East London, where fees are currently £4,164 a term.

The fraud was uncovered only when Al-Azawi, from Iraq, successfully applied for a student loan to study civil engineering at Greenwich University. When police raided her £800,000 detached home in Bromley, they found an ‘Aladdin’s cave’ of false documents, including a selection of passports, identity papers and driving licences.

She had converted the garage into an office and described herself to neighbours as an ‘internet entrepreneur’.
During her trial at Croydon Crown Court, it emerged that she had claimed for income support, housing and council tax benefits in her own name, as well as those of her cousin and mother.

She also obtained two mortgages by claiming she was a self-employed businesswoman.
Judge Stephen Waller jailed Al-Azawi for three years after she was found guilty of 13 offences of benefit fraud, forgery and theft.

Benefit cheat Al-Azawi acquired over £1 million of property using a series of false identities

Critics say the case highlights the welfare profligacy that grew unchecked under Labour. The new Government has promised to crack down on Britain’s ‘out of control’ benefits bill.
During last week’s emergency Budget, George Osborne announced that he would be taking tough decisions on welfare spending in an effort to save £4billion a year.

The court heard that Al-Azawi first came to Britain as a student, and went back to Iraq once she graduated. She later returned to Britain to claim asylum, and was given income support and housed by Lambeth council in south London.

She travelled to Ireland for a brief period and claimed asylum under a different name, and was also given Irish nationality, as was her son.
In 1999, while still living in her Lambeth council home, she bought a property in Bromley.

Four years later, she purchased her council residence under the right-to-buy scheme, and in 2005 she added another Bromley home to her growing portfolio.

The ex-council flat in Lambeth she bought via the right-to-buy scheme
She was arrested in 2008 following a joint investigation between Bromley and Lambeth councils, the Metropolitan Police and the Department for Work and Pensions.

Sentencing Al-Azawi, Judge Waller said: ‘These offences were committed over a period of eight years between 1999 and 2008 and were carried out in a sophisticated manner using different names and addresses, and false letters were used to support dishonest claims.

‘It enabled you to become the owner of three properties and to send your son to a private school.’
Councillor Lydia Buttinger, vice-chairman of Bromley’s Audit Committee, said: ‘We feel that the jail sentence is appropriate given the scale of this fraud. We have to protect the taxpayer by stamping out benefit fraud.’

The Minister for Welfare Reform, Lord Freud, said: ‘At the root of this fraud was the disguise of a series of assets, alongside the use of duplicate identities.
‘Our goal of reconfiguring and simplifying the welfare system will help to make this kind of deception more difficult.’

Under Britain’s lax sentencing rules, Al-Azawi will be out of prison in around eighteen months. Not a heavy price to pay for becoming a millionaire at the taxpayers’ expense. And although legislation exists to recover the proceeds of crime, she will in all likelihood (and especially if she’s been, ‘careful’), get to keep at least a proportion of her ill-gotten gains – not to mention her university education at our expense, which, of course, can’t be handed back.

The appallingly high number of these cases from immigrants, including those who, like Al-Azawi, criminally abuse the generosity of our asylum system (which is in place to provide safe harbour to those escaping persecution), suggest that the system itself is broken.

Yet people who complain about this are inevitably branded with the usual epithets - ‘racists’, ‘Islamophobes’, ‘intolerant’, etc. – and the system never gets fixed.

Time for a new government to reverse the Marxist reflex of the previous administration – which was to delegitimise those who complained about this wholesale abuse of the generous nature of the British, while refusing to properly acknowledge inherent flaws in the system – and ensure the only people allowed in under asylum rules are those genuinely in need of refuge.

This could easily be achieved by stringent restrictions on access to welfare benefits by asylum seekers and strong incentives to work once settled.

It’s not particle physics.

[Source: Mail on Sunday]

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