Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2023-001266 & UI-2023-001267

First-tier Tribunal No: HU/53393/2022
& HU/58383/2021
IA/05283/2022
IA/18203/2021

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

On 17th of December 2025

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE LODATO

Between

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Appellant
and

MOHAMMED EASIN JIBON & SARMIN SULTANA SATHI
(NO ANONYMITY ORDER MADE)
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellants: Mr Biggs, counsel instructed by Lexpert Solicitors LLP
For the Respondent: Mr Pugh, Senior Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 4 December 2025

DECISION AND REASONS

Introduction

1. This decision follows a resumed hearing after I found, in a decision promulgated on 26 August 2025, a material error of law in the decision of the First-tier Tribunal (‘FTT’). I preserved no findings of fact and decided that the fairest outcome would be to remake the underlying decision in the Upper Tribunal.

2. The appellants are a married couple who are citizens of Bangladesh. The second appellant, Ms Sathi, entered the United Kingdom in 2009 and enjoyed successive periods of leave, culminating in an application for indefinite leave to remain based on long residence in September 2019. Her husband, the first appellant, joined her in April 2018 as her dependant after a successful appeal in the FTT against an earlier refusal to grant him entry clearance.

3. The Secretary of State refused both applications—hers under paragraph 322 of the Immigration Rules for alleged reliance on a false Barclays bank statement in an April 2018 Tier 1 Entrepreneur application, and his consequentially made under Appendix FM—holding that deception had been employed to secure leave. The appellants deny dishonesty, maintaining that any falsity was unknown to them and arose from dealings with fraudulent third parties. The appellants have two young children born in the UK, one now a qualifying child under section 117B(6) of the Immigration, Nationality and Asylum Act 2002. Ms Sathi relied on evidence of her longstanding mental health difficulties.

4. These appeals are brought on the primary foundation that the underpinning findings of dishonesty are unsound thereby rendering the refusal decisions disproportionate under Article 8 of the ECHR. Alternative arguments were advanced that the decisions remain disproportionate even if the Secretary of State establishes dishonesty. This was due to the overall family circumstances, particularly, the contention that it would not be reasonable to require the oldest child to leave the UK now that he has lived here for the first 7 years of his life.

The Remaking Hearing

5. At the outset of the hearing, I raised the significant development that the appellants’ oldest child had, since the error of law hearing, been resident in the UK for 7 years. I invited the parties to assist me as to whether this amounted to a ‘new matter’ in accordance with the 2002 Act and, if so, whether the Secretary of State consented to the matter featuring in these proceedings. Mr Biggs argued that it was simply a factual evolution of a ground of appeal which was always before the tribunal. The best interests of this child were, from the outset, an important factor in the Article 8 assessment. On the respondent’s behalf, Mr Pugh contended that the accumulation of 7 years’ residence was plainly a ‘new matter’ because it brought into play an entirely distinct legal question about the reasonableness of expecting this child to leave the UK in circumstances where he now manifestly qualified in s.117B(6) of the 2002 Act. However, he further indicated that if I were to conclude that this was a ‘new matter’, consent would be granted for it to feature in the proceedings. I indicated at the hearing that I was satisfied that this new factual dimension of the appeal amounted to a ‘new matter’. I reached this conclusion because the attainment of 7 years’ residence in the UK meant that the Article 8 appeal fell to be considered in the context of a separate and free-standing normative question, as set out by the Court of Appeal in NA (Bangladesh) v SSHD [2021] EWCA Civ 953; [2021] 1 W.L.R. 4670. This was a question which the respondent had not previously considered because, simply put, the question had not arisen before September 2025. The parties agreed that any additional evidence touching on the s.117B(6) matter could be adduced through additional questions asked of Ms Sathi in examination-in-chief and in cross-examination. I was not asked by either side to adjourn the hearing to gather further evidence on the subject.

6. A further question which arose in preliminary dialogue with the parties was the approach I should take to the question of whether Ms Sathi had acted dishonestly in providing the respondent with a false Barclays Bank statement in the context of her 2018 leave to remain application as an entrepreneur. I informed the parties that my recollection of the respondent’s position adopted at the error of law hearing was that it was conceded that the suitability issue which underpinned the refusal decision could only be resolved against the appellant if Ms Sathi was found to have knowingly submitted a false statement at the time of the 2018 application. Notwithstanding that paragraph 322(1A) does not require knowledge of a false representation made to the Secretary of State, the position which had always been adopted by the respondent from the outset of the initial refusal decision was to reject the second appellant’s innocent explanation of how she came to provide a false document. This position hardened at the error of law hearing where I noted that the respondent accepted that, on the facts of this case, the respondent’s case hinged on subjective dishonesty, namely that Ms Sathi knew she was submitting a false document at the time of her application in 2018. Mr Pugh accepted that the suitability question could only be resolved against the appellants if I first found Ms Sathi to have knowingly submitted the false bank statement with a dishonest state of mind.

7. The parties agreed that the Barclays Bank statement stamped “23 May 2018” [at D1 of the Respondent’s Bundle for Ms Sathi’s appeal] was a false document and that Article 8 of the ECHR was engaged.

8. Following the exchange summarised above, the parties agreed that the following principal controversial issues fell to be determined in the appeal proceedings:

i. Has the Secretary of State proved on the balance of probabilities that Ms Sathi acted dishonestly in submitting the false Barclays Bank statement in 2018?

ii. If issue (i) is resolved in favour of the Secretary of State, are the refusal decisions a disproportionate interference with the family and private life rights of the appellant and their children?

9. The respondent accepted that if the first issue was resolved in the appellants’ favour, and Ms Sathi was found not to have acted dishonestly, the refusal decision would amount to a disproportionate interference with the family’s Article 8 rights because it would follow that the only principled basis on which the applications were refused would then have fallen away. If such a finding were reached, there would be no need to conduct a detailed further balancing exercise because the applications should have succeeded under a conventional application of the applicable Immigration Rules.

10. I was invited to treat Ms Sathi as a vulnerable witness on account of her documented and diagnosed mental health issues. I was not asked to make any specific adjustments to hearing procedure, but to simply take these factors into account in the assessment of her credibility as a witness. Mr Pugh did not object and I acceded to the application.

11. To have some understanding of the central allegation of dishonesty, it is necessary to set out, in broad terms, Ms Sathi’s explanation of how she came to provide the false Barclays Bank statement with her 2018 application for leave to remain in the UK as an entrepreneur.

12. Ms Sathi explained that she became involved with Mr Ronee in mid‑2017 through mutual acquaintances, including Mr Khan, whom she understood to be a Barclays Bank employee. At that time, she was engaged in a small wholesale business and agreed to a proposed joint venture with Mr Ronee to ship and sell goods to Bangladesh. When the proceeds of a sale of baby formula (arranged by Mr Ronee to be sold to a buyer in Bangladesh) did not materialise, she sought payment of £5,000 from Mr Ronee. He claimed not to have received the required payment but proposed, as a solution to the difficulties and as a sign of good faith, that Ms Sathi be added to his trading account. She agreed to this course and, after signing a mandate form, expected confirmation from Barclays that she had been added as a signatory. When this confirmation did not emerge, she queried this and, in response, received a set of bank statements from Mr Khan outside a Mosque in May 2018. These statements bore what appeared to be genuine Barclays Bank stamps, and she believed them to be authentic. Her evidence was that she relied on them solely to demonstrate maintenance funds for her husband’s immigration application and did not, and had no reason to, suspect they were false.

13. When weeks passed without any formal confirmation from the bank, Ms Sathi said that she visited a Barclays Bank branch and spoke to a member of staff, Ms P, who told her that her details did not match those on the account. She assumed this was because Mr Ronee had used incorrect information, such as his own phone number. This prompted her to seek clarification from Mr Ronee, but she could no longer establish contact with him.

14. After the Home Office raised concerns about the false bank statement in 2020, Ms Sathi undertook what she describes as extensive steps to investigate the matter. She lodged a formal complaint with Barclays, pursued correspondence with their staff, and requested verification of the seal on the statements. In addition, she reported the matter to the police and Action Fraud, though both declined to investigate. In the context of the FTT appeal proceedings, she applied for third‑party disclosure orders and a witness summons for Mr Khan, hoping to confirm his role and employment status. These efforts, she maintained, were consistent with her position that she had been an innocent victim of fraud rather than a willing participant in deception.

15. At the remaking hearing, I heard oral evidence from the appellants, Mr Ahamad and Mr Uddin. I heard detailed and helpful submissions from Mr Pugh and Mr Biggs. I address any evidence and submissions of significance in the discussion section below.

Discussion

16. Article 8 of the ECHR provides: 

(1) Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. 
(2) There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. 

17. The question is whether the refusal breaches the appellants’ right to respect for private and family life under Article 8 ECHR. That right is qualified. The appellant must establish on the balance of probabilities the factual circumstances on which they rely and that Article 8 (1) is engaged. If it is, then I have to decide whether the interference with the appellant’s right is justified under Article 8 (2). If an appellant does not meet the immigration rules, the public interest is normally in refusing leave to enter or remain. The exception is where the refusals result in unjustifiably harsh consequences for the appellant or a family member such that refusal is not proportionate. I take into account the factors set out in s.117B Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 and balance the public interest considerations against the factors relied upon by the appellant. 

18. In TZ (Pakistan) and PG (India) v SSHD [2018] EWCA Civ 1109, the Senior President of Tribunals provided guidance as to how competing public and private interests should be balanced in a case where the requirements of the Immigration Rules are satisfied. He said this at paragraph 34: 

[…] That has the benefit that where a person satisfies the Rules, whether or not by reference to an article 8 informed requirement, then this will be positively determinative of that person's article 8 appeal, provided their case engages article 8(1), for the very reason that it would then be disproportionate for that person to be removed.  

19. The appellants bear the burden of substantiating the primary facts of the appeal. The standard she must meet is on the balance of probabilities.  If the respondent alleges dishonesty, she must prove the allegation on the balance of probabilities. In Ivey v Genting Casinos (UK) Ltd (trading as Crockfords Club) [2017] UKSC 67; [2018] A.C. 391, the Supreme Court set out the test for dishonesty. At [74] of his judgment, Lord Hughes JSC held:

[…] When dishonesty is in question the fact-finding tribunal must first ascertain (subjectively) the actual state of the individual's knowledge or belief as to the facts. The reasonableness or otherwise of his belief is a matter of evidence (often in practice determinative) going to whether he held the belief, but it is not an additional requirement that his belief must be reasonable; the question is whether it is genuinely held. When once his actual state of mind as to knowledge or belief as to facts is established, the question whether his conduct was honest or dishonest is to be determined by the fact-finder by applying the (objective) standards of ordinary decent people. There is no requirement that the defendant must appreciate that what he has done is, by those standards, dishonest.

20. Tanveer Ahmed v SSHD [2002] Imm AR 318 established the following principles in relation to the judicial assessment of documentary evidence: 

I. The appellant bears the burden of demonstrating that a document should be relied upon by the tribunal. 
II. In reaching findings on the reliability of documentary evidence, the tribunal must consider the document in the context of all the evidence. 
III. It is not necessary to conclude that a document is a forgery before finding it to be unreliable. 

21. As discussed above, the parties spoke as one in confirming that the primary, and potentially decisive, issue I must resolve is whether Ms Sathi knew that she was submitting a false bank statement in 2018 when she made her application to remain in the UK on the strength of her business activities. If Ms Sathi knew this was a false document and submitted it to the Home Office in support of her application, this would plainly be subjectively dishonest conduct and would weigh heavily in any proportionality assessment which would need to absorb additional matters including Mr Jibon’s position and the reasonableness of expecting the oldest child to leave the UK. If Ms Sathi was entirely ignorant that she had provided a false document and was, instead, herself an innocent victim of fraud at the hands of Mr Ronee and Mr Khan, the respondent accepted that the appeal should be allowed on Article 8 grounds because the central foundation stone on which the refusal decisions were built would have necessarily been displaced. With these introductory remarks in mind, I turn my attention to the principal controversial issues in turn.

Has the Secretary of State proved on the balance of probabilities that Ms Sathi acted dishonestly in submitting the false Barclays Bank statement in 2018?

22. I begin my analysis of the dishonesty issue by considering Mr Pugh’s submission that there were overt features of the Barclays Bank statement which clearly revealed their falsity such that these telltale signs could not have escaped Ms Sathi’s notice. He pointed to the fact that the statement was stamped “23 May 2018” and yet included the following information:

Our UK ring-fencing plans
We plan to transfer UK retail and business banking customers to our ring-fenced bank in April 2018.

It was said to make little sense for a statement stamped in May 2018 to refer to events which were still to happen in April 2018.

23. Mr Pugh further emphasised that the statement recorded transactions between 10 January and 9 February 2018, before Ms Sathi claimed to have been added to the account and yet the statement included her name and home address. The inclusion of her personal details, together with Mr Ronee’s name, did not tally with her suggested understanding that this was an account used by Mr Ronee as a sole trader.

24. It struck me that there were two problems with these submissions, one of incoherence with the respondent’s wider case theory and one of broad plausibility. Firstly, the respondent’s overall case on dishonesty was that Ms Sathi knew full well that she provided a false bank statement at the time it was submitted. If the document had obvious markers of falsity such as a reference to the bank’s prospective ring-fencing plans at a time after those plans would have come to fruition, it is very difficult to understand why she would rely on such an obviously false document. If it were true that Ms Sathi orchestrated this deception on the Home Office, it struck me as decidedly odd that she was so careless to allow what the respondent characterised as an obvious marker of falsity to remain on the false document. The alternative explanation is that Ms Sathi simply did not examine the document quite so closely with the forensic eye which was later used to assess whether this document was genuine because she trusted the people who gave it to her for a different purpose after they had gained her misplaced confidence.

25. Ms Sathi made much this point when she responded to this suggestion under cross-examination. She emphatically stated that she simply did not look at the bank statement so closely to identify the discrepancy on the face of the document. It struck me as entirely realistic that a bank statement used to establish sufficient maintenance for a dependant would not be subjected by Ms Sathi to the kind of close scrutiny which might yield the sort of fine-margins inferences which underpinned the respondent’s submission. I note that the ring-fenced banking part of the statement appears to be a generic marketing assertion and is just the kind of impersonal boilerplate publicity which is likely to be quickly bypassed by an account-holder.

26. There was greater force to the suggestion that it was odd that Ms Sathi’s name and address appeared at the head of the statement which appeared to have been generated before she claimed to have been added to the account. I accept that this is the kind of content which might arouse suspicion. However, it struck me as plausible that Ms Sathi did not scrutinise the document having wrongly, even on her account, placed her trust in Mr Ronee and Mr Khan. I saw nothing of substance in the respondent’s suggestion that it was suspicious that the bank statement details did not expressly refer to a business account or to a sole trader account. Ms Sathi forcefully and credibly made the point that she did not have a sufficiently comprehensive understanding of how such accounts were named in bank statements for such an omission to raise her concern.

27. I return to the point made above that if these signs on the face of the document were quite so obvious markers of falsity, it begs the question of why a supposedly dishonest orchestrator of such false representations would not simply do a better job of falsifying the document before it was submitted to the Home Office. The face of the document itself does not, in isolation, betray dishonesty on Ms Sathi’s part.

28. Quite apart from a lack of evidence from the face of the document to inculpate Ms Sathi, there were a number of circumstantial features of the background which strongly tended to reveal that she had not acted dishonestly and was, instead, an innocent victim of fraud. There was no dispute that she had gone to considerable lengths to investigate the circumstances in which the impugned bank statement was produced. Not only did she make a formal complaint to Barclays Bank but, in the context of that procedure, she asked, through her solicitors, for records to support her assertions that she had queried why she could not access the account to which she believed she had been granted access. This is of importance because she claimed that she had visited an identified branch and spoke to a named member of staff on a particular date. This query at the branch was before the respondent raised their concerns about the falsity of the bank statement and, if these steps had been taken by Ms Sathi, it would be difficult to reconcile with her alleged knowledge that she had always known the document to have been falsified. It seemed to me to be implausible to claim to have raised such queries with the bank before the respondent’s concerns were raised if there was a danger that the bank might disprove, from their records, that any such steps were taken.

29. The determined attempts to persuade the police and Action Fraud to investigate the criminal deception Ms Sathi claimed to have been victim to are equally difficult to reconcile with the notion that she was at the centre of this deception from the outset. Again, if the respondent’s factual analysis is correct, Ms Sathi would have taken an extraordinary risk to encourage a criminal investigation into what might be revealed to be her own dishonesty. Much the same point falls to be made of the fully argued applications made on her behalf by her solicitors, during the FTT proceedings, to compel Barclays Bank to disclose their relevant records and to issue a witness summons for Mr Khan. These applications were ultimately refused. However, if Ms Sathi was not telling the truth about the circumstances in which she came into possession of the false bank statement and the steps she took to query the true position thereafter, she ran a serious risk of evidence coming to light which might have tended to reveal her dishonesty.

30. Mr Pugh submitted that all of these steps were merely the laying of a false trail by a sophisticated fraudster. I reject this notion. Not only did this supposedly sophisticated fraudster leave obvious markers of falsity on the face of the document itself according to the respondent’s case, such a dishonest operator would run an implausibly high risk of being exposed in her lies. At the risk of stating the obvious, fraudsters do not tend to report their banking fraud to the police and the bank.

31. A further dimension of Ms Sathi’s narrative which falls to be considered are the circumstances in which she came into possession of the bank statement. The respondent advanced the argument that bank statements are not typically hand-delivered by a bank employee outside a mosque. That much is self-evidently correct. For an account-holder to be presented with a bank statement in this informal and unconventional way would conceivably arouse concern. However, Ms Sathi’s evidence was that she was sufficiently concerned to make enquiries of the bank directly at a branch. Arguably, this should have caused her to pause and reflect before submitting this statement to the Home Office. However, it is important not to lose sight of Ms Sathi’s case that she was herself the victim of fraud from acquaintances who had gained her trust. This appears to me to fall short of the kind of evidence which might underpin a finding that she knew the statement was false and dishonestly relied upon it in the context of her application. The very fact that the bank statement was received in the way described by Ms Sathi is supported by a contemporaneous text message sent by Ms Sathi to Mr Khan: “Vaiya plz call me once u come out from masjid Urgent I’m waiting outside”. This unchallenged record at least tends to support that the circumstances in which Ms Sathi came to receive the statement were as she has always, and consistently, described.

32. A further strand of evidence which tended to support Ms Sathi’s underlying narrative of the relevant events is the Friz Ltd invoice. This document is made out to Ms Sathi, is dated 11/09/2017 and details the supply of various Aptamil and Cow & Gate formula products to a value of £4,811.04. It is marked as “PAID 15/09/17”. This is important because Ms Sathi relied on it as a business record to show that she had passed on these goods to Mr Ronee for onward sale in Bangladesh and for which she expected to recover a profit. The unpaid proceeds of the sale of these products was what was said to have led to the dialogue between her and Mr Ronee to add her to his account to draw the proceeds of sale. In short, this record was suggested to offer context to explain why Ms Sathi came into possession of the bank statement she later relied upon in her immigration application. The respondent’s position on this document shifted during the hearing. Appearing to realise that the existence of this invoice was difficult to put together with the notion that the bank statement was falsely generated for the purposes of the immigration application, Mr Pugh suggested that this too was false. The difficulty with this position was that such a contention had not been made in advance of the remaking hearing such that real questions of procedural fairness arose in such a matter emerging without warning in the context of cross-examination. Mr Pugh shifted position again and clarified that the respondent was not suggesting that this document was false, but merely that the appellant had not established its reliability in a Tanveer Ahmed sense. I have no sensible reason to doubt the reliability of the Friz Ltd invoice, and it tends to confer documentary support for the broad sequence of events described by Ms Sathi.

33. Ms Sathi was not the only witness in the proceedings. Her husband, the first appellant, also gave evidence in which he described being present when his wife was handed the bank statement in the circumstances she described. He also spoke to how neither he nor his wife suspected foul play in the bank statement being provided to them. The two appellants chose to give their oral evidence while the other waited outside the hearing room. The respondent had every opportunity to probe the consistency of their accounts and how they gelled with each other. However, Mr Jibon was not questioned or challenged about this important dimension of his evidence. However, I recognise that consistency between husband and wife does not add great weight to Ms Sathi’s primary narrative account.

34. Of greater substance was the evidence of Mr Uddin. He described how he had worked with Mr Khan previously and was with him when Mr Ronee came along and asked for Mr Khan’s assistance with a banking matter which required the stamping of a bank statement. Mr Uddin went with the pair to the Forest Gate branch of Barclays. He then observed Mr Khan appearing to be on friendly terms with staff working there who stamped the document he gave them. Independently of this episode, Mr Uddin knew Mr Khan to be an employee of Barclays Bank. After noting his belief that Ms Sathi had not acted dishonestly in relying on the bank statement, Mr Uddin concluded his witness statement in this way:

I have spoken to Juned [Khan] about this issue. He is reluctant to talk about it and he has not confirmed or denied anything. Since I brought this matter with him, he is keeping distance with me.

35. Mr Uddin struck me as an impressive and honest witness. He was not challenged about what he saw at the branch and Mr Khan’s later furtive conduct. I accept his evidence as credible. This adds yet another layer of support to Ms Sathi’s overall narrative account which, I agree with Mr Biggs’s oral submissions, can be seen to be rich in detail, supported by documentary evidence and consistent over time.

36. When I step back and assess the overall evidential picture, I am driven to conclude that the respondent has not discharged her burden to prove, on the balance of probabilities, that Ms Sathi acted with a dishonest state of mind when she submitted the admittedly false Barclays Bank statement to the Home Office. This finding coheres with her conduct after the respondent’s concerns were brought to her attention and her agreement at the earliest opportunity that the statement was, in fact, false. This was a concession of fact that she was not required to make and one which put her at a procedural and substantive forensic disadvantage in circumstances where the respondent never ultimately produced the Document Verification Report on which the allegation of dishonesty initially rested. Had she put the respondent to proof on whether the bank statement was actually false, the respondent would have been placed in considerable difficulty. That she did not take this procedural stance is hardly the behaviour of someone who has sought to dishonestly game the system but resonates with her fundamental case that she was the primary victim of a fraudulent course of conduct.

If issue (i) is resolved in favour of the Secretary of State, are the refusal decisions a disproportionate interference with the family and private life rights of the appellant and their children?

37. As I have resolved the first issue in the appellants’ favour, it is unnecessary to move to consideration of the second issue.

Conclusion

38. In accordance with the agreed principal controversial issues, I find that the respondent has not proved that Ms Sathi acted dishonestly. It follows that the centrepiece of the rationale for refusing the appellants’ applications has, on analysis, collapsed. It follows that there is no rules-based reason relied upon to dismiss the Article 8 appeal. The respondent agreed that were I to reach such findings of fact, the Article 8 appeal must be allowed because the refusal decisions would become disproportionate. I so find and allow the appeals.

Notice of Decision

I allow the appeal on Article 8 human rights grounds. 

P Lodato

Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

15 December 2025