A solicitor who ‘brought shame on the profession’ has been jailed for eight-and-a-half years at Croydon Crown Court for his part in an immigration scam.

Adeyinka Adeniran, 39, a principal at London firm Julius Ceasar, supplied clients and documents to a bogus college located at a property in south London’s New Cross Road. The ‘college’ was used as ‘an epicentre for the manufacture of fraudulent documents’ which were produced to support visa applications.

An elderly couple who ran the ‘college’ were each sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. They specialised in helping Nigerian immigrants to fraudulently obtain leave to remain in the UK, and furnished them with worthless qualifications – mostly in the healthcare industry.

Judge Heather Baucher said vulnerable individuals had been treated by people employed on the basis of the fraudulent documents supplied by the college.

Adeniran, who was admitted to the solicitors’ roll despite having been imprisoned for 15 months for conspiracy to obtain UK passports 20 years ago, boasted to police that he had made £500,000 from criminal legal aid work.

‘You were the central player. You referred clients… for documentation,’ Judge Baucher told him. ‘There was no end to the documents you were prepared to use. You were a man prepared to stop at nothing. You had total disregard for your office of solicitor.’

She added: ‘You are a disgrace to your profession and have brought shame on the profession as a whole.’

The father-of-two claimed to run his law firm alone, but employed illegal immigrant staff, who paid no tax or national insurance contributions during the four-year scam.

‘You masterminded this whole operation and you were not satisfied with the half a million you made from criminal work,’ added Judge Baucher.

A spokesman for the Solicitors Regulation Authority said: ‘Solicitors who facilitate illegal immigration seriously harm public trust in the profession. We will ask the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal to deal with Mr Adeniran at the earliest opportunity.’