Crooked Wolverhampton Pc jailed over sham marriage tip-off
A crooked Wolverhampton police officer has been jailed for tipping off the mastermind behind a high-profile sham marriage ring.
Pc Nigel Orme, whose beat covered Whitmore Reans, accessed the police computer to dish the dirt to Mohammed Akhtar, aged 29 from Dunstall Road, Wolverhampton, about the investigation.
Akhtar was locked up for five years in May after pleading guilty to 11 counts of conspiracy to facilitate a breach of immigration laws.
And at Birmingham Crown Court on Monday, Orme, of Chester Road North, Kidderminster, was jailed for six months. His actions were described as a 'gross dereliction of duty'.
The court heard how the married 49-year-old accessed the police computer systems to find information on Akhtar.
Orme had been asked to do so by his friend Adilah Hussain, whose family he had met through work.
Orme informed Ms Hussain by text that the case against Akhtar, who worked as a paralegal, concerned fraudulent documents. He then told Ms Hussain that Akhtar had 'nothing to worry about'.
His corrupt behaviour came to light in September 2013 when officers found text messages between Akhtar and Ms Hussain suggesting information was being passed from police records.
Investigations linked Orme to Hussain and the pair were arrested last March. In just three days, Orme and the woman exchanged 371 messages.
DCI Debra Doyle, of the force's professional standards department, said: "The reason Orme broke the law - along with the trust of his colleagues and those he served - has never been fully established.
"There is no suggestion that he was paid for the information but we know he had a close relationship with those involved.
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"What we were able to show, right from the start, was that he knew his actions were disgraceful for a police officer.
"As officers brought Orme into custody he pleaded with them saying 'I'm not a corrupt policeman, I'm a stupid policeman. I have looked at systems when I shouldn't of to find things out'."
Orme pleaded guilty to a single charge of causing a computer to perform a function to secure unauthorised access to a program or data. He has since been sacked by West Midlands Police and will lose his police pension.
Recorder Keith Raynor told him: "You, as a police officer with a duty to the public and to the police accessed confidential and sensitive information in the police computer.
"It amounts to a gross dereliction of your duty."
Until his arrest Orme had an otherwise unblemished 19 year career with West Mercia and then West Midlands Police.
Ms Hussain, 26, of Viaduct Drive, Wolverhampton, was cleared of aiding and abetting Orme during a trial last month.
Akhtar used his job at a solicitors to make contact with immigrants from the Indian sub-continent whose visas had expired and charged hefty fees to pair them up with Czech and Slovakian brides.
His scam was rumbled after a long running home office investigation which revealed he had kept detailed dossiers on each 'couple' including fake love letters and staged wedding pictures.
