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A vicar allegedly presided over hundreds of sham marriages in a "massive and cynical scheme" to exploit vulnerable people and enable illegal immigrants to stay in Britain, a court has heard.
Rev Alexander Brown married 383 couples in the four years to July 2009 at the Church of St Peter and St Paul in St Leonards, Sussex, a 30-fold increase on the 13 marriages held there in the preceding four-year period.
David Walbank, opening the case for the prosecution, told Lewes crown court: "He conducted each of these wedding ceremonies ostensibly according to the rites of the Church of England but knowing full well these were sham marriages not entered into for the proper reasons but as part of an immigration fraud."
Brown is charged with conspiracy to facilitate breaches of immigration laws with two other men, Rev Michael Adelasoye, a solicitor who specialised in immigration, and Vladymyr Buchak, a Ukranian man who was living illegally in the UK.
Of the 383 weddings in the four-year period, 90 were between couples who claimed to live on one road close to the church. In the space of one month in the spring of 2009 Brown married four couples who gave their address as the same house on a nearby street. These were false addresses, according to the prosecution.
The prosecution said that after his arrest in June last year Brown told police "he had belatedly grown suspicious about the number of weddings going through his church and had planned to cut down on the number of ceremonies". In fact, said Walbank: "In the period prior to his arrest the frequency of the weddings continued to increase dramatically." Almost half the "bogus" weddings occurred in the final six months before Brown's arrest.
During the six-week trial the court will hear from some of those who undertook the allegedly sham marriages and were given a police caution. Brown and the other two defendants deny the charges.
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Continue to pray for all parties involved.
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