AN elaborate Italian fraudulent divorce scam has been foiled thanks to a conscientious clerk at Burnley County Court.

Julie Farrah flagged up a divorce petition involving an Italian husband and wife in February 2012 after it aroused her suspicion.

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She questioned why an Italian couple who listed their address as Maidenhead in Berkshire would be applying for a divorce more than 200 miles away, in Burnley.

Her doubts led Thames Valley Police to a flat in Maidenhead, which turned out to be nothing more than an anonymous mailbox.

And that led to exposure of an intricate conspiracy in which almost 200 Italian couples had fraudulently sought divorces from the English courts.

The mailboxes were rented by Francesco Galata, who lives in Sarzana in Italy, who police said had charged £120 an hour to facilitate divorces across Europe.

In Italy, the divorce process is considerably longer and costlier than in it is the UK, and it can take more than three years for an Italian divorce to be granted.

England’s most senior family judge, Sir James Munby, brought a halt to the plot and said that such an event must never be allowed to happen again.

The judge, who is President of the High Court Family Division, said that bogus divorce petitions had been issued at 137 county courts across the country. In almost all of them, the ‘flat’ was given as the address of one half of the couple who claimed to be ‘habitually resident'’ in England.

Sir James ruled that the divorces that had been granted were void, as they had been ‘procured by fraud’.

The ruling means that the couples involved remain married to their original partners, even if they have since remarried and had children.

Sir James said that steps must now be taken, including the centralisation of handling of divorce petitions, to prevent any similar frauds in future.

He added: “Given the dimensions of the mailbox, it is clear that not even a single individual, however small, could possibly reside in it.”