Shakeel Ahmed was caught using fraudulent or forged character references by SIA’s decision team and was sentenced to 12-month community order with a 150-hour unpaid work duty at Bradford Magistrates’ Court on 9 February 2023. He was also ordered to pay £600 prosecution costs and a victim surcharge of £95.

Mr Ahmed applied for an SIA licence to work in the private security industry on 12 March 2021. The SIA rejected his licence application due to previous criminality. Mr Ahmed sent four supposedly independent character references to the SIA in support of an appeal. The SIA’s decision team realised that the character references were either fraudulent or forged, due to suspicious similarities between them.

On 25 November 2021 SIA investigators interviewed Mr Ahmed under caution. During the interview Mr Ahmed repeatedly denied that he had forged the character references. Eventually he admitted that he had produced four independent character references and forged the signatures on three of them. His intention was to use the forgeries to appeal against the SIA’s decision to refuse him a licence.

Jenny Hart, the SIA’s criminal investigations manager said:

The purpose of the SIA’s licensing regime is to protect the public. The SIA applies significant scrutiny during the decision process to assess whether someone is ‘fit and proper’ to hold an SIA licence. Mr Ahmed’s previous criminality had led to the decision that he was not suitable to hold a licence. Forgery is a serious criminal offence, and I commend the vigilance of SIA colleagues in detecting this fraud.