An­na-Lisa Paul

A Williamsville man who ad­mit­ted to seek­ing a visa re­new­al from the US Em­bassy with a false cred­it state­ment avoid­ed serv­ing a jail term when a mag­is­trate placed him on a bond and or­dered him to keep the peace for the next six months. Randy Na­gir, 44, of Ce­ment Road, Mayo, ap­peared be­fore Mag­is­trate Mar­cia Mur­ray in the Port-of-Spain First Court on Thurs­day. Na­gir, an in­dus­tri­al en­gi­neer­ing con­sul­tant, was charged with ten­der­ing the false doc­u­ment on Au­gust 5, 2011.

The court heard that on Au­gust 5 last year, Na­gir went to the US Em­bassy, Mar­li Street, with a fi­nan­cial state­ment dat­ed Au­gust 3, 2011 in the name of the Lon­don Bap­tist Cred­it Union, in­di­cat­ing that he had $68,863.84 worth of shares. How­ev­er, while at the em­bassy, Na­gir con­fessed to an of­fi­cial that the doc­u­ment was false. Na­gir's at­tor­ney Chat­er­am Sinanan told Mur­ray that Na­gir "al­lowed him­self to be car­ried away" af­ter he re­turned to Trinidad in 2009, as his fam­i­ly had re­mained be­hind in the US.

Sinanan said Na­gir be­came des­per­ate af­ter he learnt his daugh­ter had been tak­en in­to po­lice cus­tody af­ter she was in­volved in a fight with a school­mate. He said Na­gir's con­tri­tion was ap­par­ent from the start as he owned up to it at the em­bassy and had co-op­er­at­ed with the po­lice as he re­vealed the name and ad­dress of the man who had giv­en him the false doc­u­ment. The mag­is­trate was al­so in­formed that Na­gir had been a le­gal res­i­dent in the US for 2000-2003, when he was grant­ed a work visa, but that from 2003 to 2009, he and his fam­i­ly had been il­le­gal im­mi­grants. Na­gir re­port­ed­ly re­turned to Trinidad af­ter he was told that il­le­gal im­mi­grants could ap­ply to have their sta­tus reg­u­larised.

Warn­ing Na­gir that it was a se­ri­ous mat­ter that car­ried a max­i­mum jail term of up to two years, Mur­ray said the preva­lence of such an of­fence al­so car­ried in­ter­na­tion­al im­pli­ca­tions which could not be ig­nored. Tak­ing in­to con­sid­er­a­tion Na­gir's guilty plea, the na­ture of the of­fence and his co-op­er­a­tion with the au­thor­i­ties, Mur­ray placed him on a bond in the sum of $5,000 to keep the peace for six months. In de­fault, Na­gir will serve six months' hard labour.