Advice sought on visa refusal - philippines fiance

[corum99]

Hi,

My fiance in the Phillipines has had her marriage/selltement visa rejected. The rejection letter states that the National Statistics Office in the Philippines did not confirm her annulment. We submitted her decree absolute with the application, which is all that they asked for. The decree was registered with her local office in early February (prior to our visa application) and so the problem is obviously with the Statistics Office and internal communication. No effort was made to contact my fiance to see if this could be resolved. She has subsequently obtained written confirmation that the Annulment has now been communicated to the NSO.

Secondly, although we submitted all of the required 'specified evidence' for finance, the rejection letter states "I note that you have not submitted a VAF4A Appendix 2 form. You have provided no evidence of your fiance's financial circumstances".

Two paragraphs later the refusal letter states "You state in Appendix 2 of your application....bank statements have been provided". So now the assessor has suddenly found some of the evidence. I'm pretty speechless at this point.

It then goes on "...payslips from your sponsors employer or an Employer's letter of confirmation of employment have not been provided". Yet these documents were all enclosed within the package sent back from the assessment center in Manila and the assessor clearly hadn't bothered to check the rest of the evidence properly and locate them!

I'm totally unhappy about this situation which is completely unprofessional and borderline farce. The wording of the refusal letter leaves no doubt that the assessment was seriously flawed, especially around the financial evidence.

I'm on the point of lodging a formal complaint with the UKBA but am unsure whether this will help or hinder any subsequent appeal.

Any advice from knowledgeable people would be appreciated.

[corum99]

Well I submitted a formal complaint to the UKBA this morning, so we shall have to see how that turns out.

I guess the next step is the first tier tribunal. A solicitor advised us we have a good chance and mentioned costs of £600 if no court appearance was required and about £1200 if a court appearance was necessary. Whilst googling around yesterday I noticed another website quoting costs of 2 to 5k! We simply do not have thousands of pounds to throw at this.

What are the chances of success if we decide to appeal ourselves with a paper based hearing? We believe our case is strong, the original assessment was clearly flawed and can provide all the evidence needed to counter the original grounds for refusal.

[Rayking]

Do it yourself, provided you can present evidence required. I can assure you that it might not even get to court before you're called to submit your passport for visa. As long as the mistake is there's, you have a strong case.

[corum99]

Thanks for the encouraging words rayking. My Fiance felt more comfortable going through the solicitor in the end so she has managed to borrow some funds and we have instructed the solicitor to proceed. I spoke to him briefly on viber earlier and he also thinks their is a good chance of it being resolved before it even gets to the first tier tribunal although no guarantees of course. That's still going to leave us £725 worse off (plus an extra £600 if it goes to tribunal) but at least we can relax a bit more now and leave it in the hands of the professionals.

[corum99]

Well, we had some encouraging news yesterday. An email from the embassy stating they will reconsider the application and asking for me to resubmit the payslips and for my Fiance to resubmit her passport within 10 days. So we are now very hopeful of a positive resolution.
It's a shame my Fiance had to (unnecessarily as it turned out) borrow and spent £800 on a lawyer because of the mix up but never mind, at least we took no chances and things are moving in the right direction.

[corum99]

Well we have been successful now. The embassy were very quick to sort things out and my fiance now has her visa. Happy days!

I have another question though. She is under the impression that she needs to buy a return flight ticket. The visa is 'marriage-settlement' so the intention is to apply for leave to remain shortly after the wedding. Is she right in that she must have a return flight ticket when she comes over? There are two problems with this as I see it. Firstly the unnecessary expense and secondly (as i understand it) tickets don't necessarily become available until about four months before the flight, whereas the visa is for six months.