Tribunal decisions

The decision

IAC-fH-nl-V1

Upper Tribunal
(Immigration and Asylum Chamber) Appeal Numbers: va/06355/2013
va/06358/2013

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Heard at Field House
Determination Promulgated
On 5 December 2013
On 23 December 2013

Before

MR JUSTICE MITTING
UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE MOULDEN

Between

javed ahmed
REHANA JAVED
Appellants
and

THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

DETERMINATION AND REASONS
1. On 5 March 2011 Javed Ahmed and Rehana Javed, his wife, made an online application for a visit visa to permit both of them to visit and stay with her brother, Mian Muhammad Ijaz Khan, a British citizen resident in Coventry, commencing on 5 April 2011 and lasting for six weeks. The application was determined and refused by the Entry Clearance Officer in Dubai for the following reasons.
2. As far as Javed Ahmed’s application was concerned he was not satisfied by the evidence produced by him as to his income and capital and/or that it was consistent with expenditure required to fund his and his wife’s visit. The Entry Clearance Officer was therefore not satisfied that he was genuinely seeking entry as a visitor and intended to leave at the end of his stay. As far as his wife is concerned, having first of all rejected her husband’s application, he concluded that Rehana Javed would not be able adequately to maintain herself during her visit or meet the cost of her return flight. Both appellants appealed to the First-tier Tribunal their applications having already been the subject of an unsuccessful internal Home Office review.
3. By a Determination and Reasons promulgated on 3 October 2013, after a paper hearing, Judge Reed dismissed the two appeals. He found that Javed Ahmed had not demonstrated that he met the requirements of sub-paragraphs 41(i), (ii) and (vii) of the Immigration Rules and as far as Rehana Javed was concerned that she had not satisfied the requirements of paragraph 41(vii). The reasons which he gave were as follows:
(1) Javed Ahmed had not shown that he received the income that he claimed from his employment as a sales manager for Khans Jewellery said to be Rs.35,000 per month (approximately £233 sterling). He found that the single sheet bank statement which had been produced to the Entry Clearance Officer and was put in evidence before him was inadequate either to support his claimed income from employment or to demonstrate his capital. It was a somewhat curious document. It was a statement of account for the “period” 1 March 2013. It showed no movements of funds, still less the crediting of salary or other income.
(2) Further the judge was not satisfied that the funds showed to his credit in that account Rs.334,165 (about £2,200 sterling) were genuinely available to him.
(3) As far as Rehana Javed’s appeal was concerned he did accept that the Entry Clearance Officer’s reasoning and judgment was wrong insofar as he based his refusal on the belief that she would not adequately be able to maintain and accommodate herself during her visit, having accepted as both the Entry Clearance Officer and the judge did, that her brother would maintain both of them during their visit. That was an illogical, indeed perverse conclusion but he did accept the alternative reason given by the Entry Clearance Officer that she would not be able to meet the cost of the return flight and so under paragraph 41(7) of the Immigration Rules the judge concluded that she had failed to show that she could meet those costs.
4. This is an out of country appeal. Accordingly the only material which the First-tier Tribunal is entitled to consider is that which was before the Entry Clearance Officer. In written statements put in before the First-tier Tribunal the appellants offered, to the extent that they could, explanations for the deficiencies found by the Entry Clearance Officer in the information which they had provided to him. They were to the effect that the income from employment enjoyed by Javed Ahmed was paid to him in cash and that accordingly it was not put through his bank account at any rate periodically. There was some explanation proffered about a property transaction which, if we understand the position correctly was said to be the source of the balance in the account on 1 March 2011. Given the opacity of the explanation we are unsurprised by the judge’s conclusion that he had difficulty in understanding the report and the effect of the documents. They are in fact still unclear to us.
5. In one respect not dealt with by the Entry Clearance Officer an error may have been made. Both Javed Ahmed and Rehana Javed stated in their online applications that in addition to his income from employment either he or both of them or them jointly enjoyed income from property of Rs.30,000 a month (approximately £200 a month) and accordingly the ratio of the cost of the visit to the monthly income which they enjoyed, alighted upon by the Entry Clearance Officer, was erroneous. This found no echo in the decision of the First-tier Tribunal but it could not in our judgment have led to a different conclusion. On any view a substantial sum by the standards of the funds available to these appellants was being spent on this trip.
6. On a fair reading of the Entry Clearance Officer’s decision and of the Determination and Reasons of the Immigration Judge that is not something that featured large. The root reason for the Entry Clearance Officer’s decision and the decision of the First-tier Tribunal Judge was that there was simply no satisfactory evidence of either income or capital. Given that the Entry Clearance Officer was clearly entitled to conclude that he was not satisfied about the matters set out in sub-paragraphs (i), (iii) and (vii) of paragraph 41 of the Immigration Rules and the First-tier Tribunal Judge was likewise entitled to conclude that in reaching that decision the Entry Clearance Officer had not made an error.
7. Accordingly and for those reasons we do not find that the First-tier Tribunal made an error of law in the case of the husband, Javed Ahmed. Nor did he make an error of law in the case of Rehana Javed once it is understood that the decision of the Entry Clearance Officer and of the First-tier Tribunal Judge was founded on the premise that her husband’s application for entry clearance had failed. If we had not reached that conclusion then we would have considered it to be a permissible approach to treat the two applications together so that a failure in respect of the serious financial matter in the case of the husband’s application would inevitably lead to an identical conclusion in relation to the application of his wife. Consequently, even if we had been persuaded that there was an error of law in the approach to the wife’s case we would not have allowed her appeal on the facts as we have stated. For those reasons this appeal is dismissed.

Signed Date

Mr Justice Mitting