An Oxford University academic and refugee campaigner is allegedly running an illicit operation to help bring foreign workers to the UK.
Dr. Ozlem Galip faces allegations of accepting payments from small businesses in exchange for securing Home Office licenses to employ migrant workers, despite not being registered with any official regulator, a requirement mandated by law.
She allegedly told some of her clients to lie to government officials and deny knowing her if questioned.
And she is even claimed to have arranged a ‘ghost visa’ to illegally bring a migrant to Britain by secretly using a licence she had set up for a shop owner to sponsor an extra ‘worker’ without telling him.
The horrified boss said he only discovered when he was investigated months later by the Home Office and questioned about an extra overseas member of staff he never knew existed.
He now questions whether there are others she has covertly brought to the UK this way who have simply ‘vanished’.
The case exposes gaping holes in Home Office checks surrounding the skilled worker visa system, which legitimate recruiters warn have led to hundreds of thousands of workers arriving in the UK in an immigration scandal that dwarfs the small boats crisis.
Extraordinarily, Dr Galip carried out her operation while benefiting from a taxpayer-funded £234,770 research grant for an Oxford University-backed study about ’empowering women’.
Dr Ozlem Galip (pictured) is accused of taking money from small businesses to get them Home Office licences to hire migrant labour, despite not being registered with any official regulator
She carried out her alleged operation while benefiting from a taxpayer-funded £234,770 research grant for an Oxford University-backed study about ’empowering women’. Pictured: File photo of University of Oxford
But in an alleged sideline to her academic and refugee work, Dr Galip (pictured) is sole director of a company called Galip & Co Immigration Ltd
The academic, who holds a PhD in Kurdish Studies, is a research fellow at Oxford where she has also taught Kurdish to students and academics for several years.
She has also taken roles at Kurdish NGOs and women’s and refugees’ organisations, and in her blog on her personal website – entitled ‘Women of Resistance’ – vows to challenge ‘mainstream voices’ and champion those ‘overlooked due to systematic ethnocentric ignorance and assumptions of white superiority’.
It is illegal for an unregulated adviser to provide immigration guidance or services in the UK.
But in an alleged sideline to her academic and refugee work, she is sole director of a company called Galip & Co Immigration Ltd and is said to have assisted several businesses to obtain skilled worker visa licences allowing them to bring workers to the UK.
When Onur Payasli, who runs a supermarket in Bournemouth, wanted to sponsor a Turkish worker as his store manager in April 2024, he was put in touch with Dr Galip, who told him she had been organising skilled worker visas for several years.
He said Dr Galip quoted around £2,000 to arrange the Home Office licence and visa – half the price of others offering the service – so she carried out the application on his behalf.
In March this year, she unexpectedly contacted him to warn that the Home Office might investigate him.
He claimed Dr Galip told him not to go to the shop to avoid the government officials and, if he did see them, to say they were simply friends and that she had helped him fill out the sponsorship application using her laptop.
She is said to have assisted several businesses to obtain skilled worker visa licences allowing them to bring workers to the UK. Pictured: File photo
She also asked him to send his email address so she could change it on the Home Office online portal, he claimed.
When Home Office investigators eventually interviewed Mr Payasli in May he was shocked to hear that, as well as the retail manager, his sponsorship licence had been used to bring a second Turkish woman to the UK in July 2024 officially as a ‘sales supervisor’.
The Home Office official wanted to know the whereabouts of this woman who appeared to have ‘vanished’ after her arrival, he said.
The sponsorship for this second worker had been arranged online via the Home Office visa sponsorship management portal.
Mr Payasli said he never had access to this system and his firm’s account had been unknowingly set up by Dr Galip using her Gmail account.
The same Gmail address has been linked to a Turkish restaurant in Brighton run by Dr Galip’s family.
Mr Payasli subsequently confronted Dr Galip, who he said admitted to ‘helping someone’, but claimed she hadn’t charged any money for it.
In WhatsApp messages seen by the Daily Mail, she warned him that if he complained to the Home Office she would make counter complaints, telling him: ‘You’ll be the one who suffers the most from this.’
It is illegal for an unregulated adviser to provide immigration guidance or services in the UK. Pictured: File photo
Mr Payasli said he had since spoken to others who have used her services and has reported it to the Home Office, which suspended his licence while officials investigate.
He said his experience appears to reveal a flaw in the Home Office online system that allows sponsor accounts to be set up with no verification required from the business owner.
The owner of an east London Turkish restaurant also told the Daily Mail that Dr Galip had submitted a sponsorship licence application on her behalf – after receiving £560 to do so – and then told her to ‘lie’ to the Home Office about this when questioned.
A transcript of her Home Office interview shows the restaurant owner told officials that Dr Galip’s Gmail which had been used to set up her sponsorship portal was her own, but was unable to sign in using this email when requested.
The restaurant owner later told the Daily Mail she said she was originally given Dr Galip’s number by another business owner in Greenwich, east London who said she had helped her get a sponsorship licence to bring in skilled workers.
Lawyers for Galip told the Daily Mail she ‘unequivocally denies’ all the allegations and that she was a ‘respected academic with an international profile’.
Her firm, Galip & Co Immigration Ltd, is still active, though she applied to Companies House to strike it from the register on the day the Daily Mail approached her for comment.
A Home Office spokesman said: ‘Illegal activity will not be tolerated and we will stop at nothing to ensure our immigration rules are respected and enforced.
‘As legal proceedings are currently ongoing, it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time.’
