A Melbourne-based Indian migration agent has been banned after he was found to have made false and misleading statements in support of protection visa applications, and failed to act honestly and ethically.
Jujhar Bajwa, director of Bajwa Immigration Consultants, which has offices in Australia, India and Canada, and hundreds of thousands of social media followers, was deregistered for five years on Thursday by the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority (OMARA).
OMARA said in its decision to cancel Bajwa’s registration that it first started investigating him in January 2024 and alleged he had failed to declare providing immigration assistance to applicants for Permanent Protection (subclass 866) visas, which are for asylum seekers who arrived in Australia on a valid visa.
According to the published decision, Bajwa denied wrongdoing and blamed administrative errors, was further investigated, and in March 2025 again denied a series of allegations, but OMARA ultimately found that he had breached his obligations as a registered migration agent.
OMARA found Bajwa failed to notify the Department of Home Affairs that he had provided immigration assistance, “failed to act ethically and honestly with integrity, failed to comply with migration law and his duty not to undermine migration law”, and provided false and misleading information to the Authority.
Bajwa, who was first registered in 2007, also “made false and misleading statements in support of applications and to the Department, which he knew to be false or misleading”, OMARA found.
“The Authority was also satisfied that [Bajwa] was not a person of integrity, or otherwise not a fit and proper person to give immigration assistance,” OMARA stated in a decision summary.
In a statement to The Australia Today Bajwa insisted he had done nothing wrong, claimed he was the victim of a “two-year witch hunt” by the Authority, and said he was challenging the decision at a tribunal.
“This is not a matter where I was accused by a client of any wrongdoing, fraud or incompetent migration assistance. I take pride in the fact that during the last nearly 20 years, I have assisted countless clients, many in dire straits with very little hope of getting a good migration outcome,” he said.
“The allegation against us was that I did not declare migration assistance in 38 visa applications, of which 30 were for protection visas. OMARA’s basis for this allegation that they found these applications were lodged from IP addresses of my office. We provided sufficient evidence to OMARA to prove that the applications were lodged by the applicants themselves.
“Most of the clients in question even provided statutory declarations stating that I did not assist them in their protection visa applications.
“Almost a year after first sending a notice, the investigator alleged that I used my business bank cards to pay application fee for these protection visa applications, simply because the last four digits on the cards used to pay the visa fees matched my the last four digits on my card, not realising that there may be thousands of cards with the same four digits.
“We provided a comprehensive response to OMARA in this matter, and any fair-minded person would have concluded that the allegations against me were unfounded. However, it is evident from the two-year witch hunt that OMARA investigator was working on a pre-determined outcome, stretching the dots to somehow join them even when they did not.
“I am confident that our appeal against this decision will be successful in the Administrative Review Tribunal where the process is much fairer.”
Last month a Sydney-based Indian migration agent was banned for similar reasons, and the cancellations came after the government launched a crackdown on the industry and tripled staff.
Header image: Jujhar Bajwa (LinkedIn).
The post Indian migration agent struck off for ‘failing to act ethically and honestly’ first appeared on The Noticer.
The NoticerRead More
T1
