Migration Alliance members have been in contact and have expressed the view that Migration Alliance should defend and protect it's name against ME Alliance Pty Ltd otherwise named Migration and Education Alliance, owned and operated by RMA Praveen Goyal.

If any RMAs, who are also solicitors are familiar with this area of law and would be able to advise us, we would be pleased to hear from you.  We would like to keep the work within the profession and amongst our members where possible.

As ME Alliance Pty Ltd is a small business, Migration Alliance has lodged an application with the Small Business Commissioner for mediation with ME Alliance Pty Ltd to try and request that Mr Goyal refrain from using 'Migration and Education Alliance' as his trading name.

A message has just been received from DIBP regarding ImmiAccount as follows:

"Can you please flag with Migration Alliance members that there will be an ImmiAccount outage from 2 til 9pm this Saturday.

We will put outage comms on the DIBP website but I wanted to advise you as well given the late notice – apologies for this but our IT colleagues were unable to confirm until today.

Migration Alliance has been contacted by a number of concerned Adelaide residents following the release yesterday of our updates on Abel Kalpinand Prasad.  We were then provided details of an RMA who worked with Abel and contacted him for his recollections.  Our contact is an RMA who is based in Adelaide and had the unfortunate experience of having come across Abel Kalpinand Prasad.  

Background

Our contact in Adelaide is a migration agent and reports that in 2011-2012 Abel Prasad (Abel) would advertise for and then have "many Chinese clients turn up to the office" and that Abel appeared to be running a pyramid scheme and that Abel would arrange for agents and referrers to bring people to him.   

THE DIBP have updated their policy as a result of the MRT finding that their policy did not meet the purpose of the legislative requirement.  To quote the decision as follows

"The Tribunal is persuaded by the applicant’s submission that the new policy adopted on 15 May 2013 goes beyond the scope of the relevant Regulations. The Tribunal notes the applicant’s submission that the purpose of policy is to annotate the relevant legislation, and as aforementioned, the Tribunal has exercised care in applying PAM such that it is not raised to the level of a legislative requirement."

A full copy of the decision which influenced this policy change is here.

Since 2006, not a single person has been prosecuted by Australia’s foreign investment watchdog – the FIRB. In the meantime, property prices have almost doubled in the major cities. In recent years, the market is said to be growing at an unsustainable rate of over 10 per cent with analysts warning of a property market bubble that could send Australia’s economy spiralling into waters unchartered since the 1990s.

The toothless FIRB and aggressive foreign interest have been blamed for this unprecedented growth in the property  market which many say are leaving the Australian dream of home-ownership, as just that, a dream.

Treasurer Joe Hockey announced yesterday plans for a raft of new laws which he believes will change all of this. Once in effect, foreigners, both temporary and non-residents, are expected to pay an application fee to the Treasury before being allowed to buy Australian residential property:

"For any foreign investor that wants to buy a residential property under $1 million, there will be a $5,000 application fee," said the Treasurer according to a report on the ABC.

"Over $1 million, it will be $10,000 for every extra million dollars in the purchase price.