With the British general election just 9 days off, Tony Blair's government is faced with yet another immigration scandal: the discovery of a massive sham marriage ring. The Guardian reports:

Yesterday Jaswinder Gill was sentenced to 10 years for the scam which may have earned her up to £1m after a trial that saw her branded as "greedy, manipulative and a total alien to the truth".

Gill, 42, went to extraordinary lengths to pull off a series of cons. She would organise elaborate Indian wedding sets to fool the British Asian women. She handed out cards in supermarkets and nightclubs in the hunt for recruits, promising help in starting a modelling career. At least 15 women were involved - all described by police as "vulnerable", with drug or money problems.

As in the voting fraud scandal I earlier reported here, the perpetrators seem to be all drawn from Britain's "Asian" community.

Two other men, Fasil Rashid, 31, of Acton, west London, and Ahmed Zubair, 20, of Hayes, west London, were jailed for four years and 12 months respectively.

Gill's scam ran from 2000 to 2004 and police do not know how many fake marriages she may have orchestrated, nor where the men are. When police raided her home they found false documentation designed to help facilitate the sham marriages.

The Guardian is of course reporting the convictions as a first success for the Blair government's "tough" new rules on bogus marriage, contrasting it favorably with the "previous system":

Mark Rimmer, the director of registrars in the London borough of Brent, was a critic of the previous system: "Up to 20% of all weddings in London were potentially bogus, that's between 8,000 to 10,000 a year. Immigration Service estimates were 10,000 to 15,000 a year across the UK."

The government deserves credit -- if credit is due for (finally) enforcing its own laws.