Razak v Secretary of State for the Home Department

This is an application by Mr Mohamed Riyas Abdul Razak for permission to appeal from the refusal of judicial review after an oral hearing in relation to his application to the Secretary of State made on 9 October 2012 to remain as a Tier 4 (General) Student Migrant, for which he had to show a figure of £19,800 per annum, for the relevant period at any rate, continuously in his bank account for 28 days before any day during the month before his application; in other words, between 9 September and 9 October.

What he produced and has been shown to me for the first time this morning but was apparently before the Home Office and the Upper Tribunal are three pages of a Lloyds TSB bank statement in which the last entry is 24 September 2012 for £14,626.92. That, together with money in an overseas account, the relevance of which the Secretary of State apparently (according to Mr Jafar, who has appeared for Mr Razak) now accepts, would bring him within the £19,800 figure, but the objection made by the Secretary of State, both in her refusal letter, and the only objection, according to Mr Jafar, at the judicial review hearing, was that the Lloyds TSB statement did not show what had happened between 24 September and the date of the statement, namely 1 October, and he then says further that if one looks at the position, as the applicant is entitled to do, dating 28 days back from 1 October, namely to 3 September, one would find that he had available to him £19,800. He therefore submits it is at least arguable that the only right course for the Secretary of State to have taken was to accept what the statement appeared to show, since it was dated 1 October, that that sum was available to the applicant for the relevant 28 day period. That seems to me to be an arguable point, though one does see why the Home Officemight have been a bit puzzled that, although there were many entries on most days in September, that suddenly, if it really were the case, no entry was being made for a whole week, which would indicate apparently that Mr Razak did not use the account for a whole week, which is a little surprising.

Nevertheless, Mr Razak says as a second point that if the Home Office were puzzled by that it was only fair that they should have asked for a full statement of the entirety of the period, and that if they had asked for that then Mr Razak would have been able to produce the documents now at pages 106 to 112 of the bundle, which do indeed show a continuous statement, or number of statements, showing that nothing happened in the account on that day. So, under the Rodriguez doctrine, as amplified by the Supreme Court case of Mandalia v SSHD [2015] UKSC 59, the only fair thing was to ask for that further information, and in that event his application for further leave to remain as a student would have been granted.

It seems to me, now that Mr Jafar has explained the potentially muddling documentation that is before the court, that that is at least an arguable proposition, so I will grant permission to appeal. It is a very simple case really. We will give it half a day, two Lord Justices, one of them can be a High Court judge.