Portuguese passport, job racket busted

Panaji: Old Goa police on Tuesday busted a racket that cheated people on the pretext of providing them with a Portuguese passport and getting them jobs, mostly in America and Europe.
A Margao resident, Abdul Khan, filed a complaint at the Old Goa police station stating that, since July 2021, Albino Sequeira and his wife have taken money from him and others on the pretext of providing them with Portuguese birth registrations and Portuguese passports.
Old Goa PI Satish Padwalkar said that the accused received the money but did not provide the complainant and others with the promised Portuguese passport. “It is suspected that there are around 50 clients from Goa who have been cheated of lakhs of rupees,” he said.
Padwalkar said that Sequeira had been operating for the past eight to 10 years and had set up his own mechanism to register births in Portugal and to make Portuguese passports. He had also projected himself as instrumental in getting people jobs abroad, mainly in European countries and the US. “Initially, he managed a few cases successfully. But, in the past four to five years, Sequeira had taken lakhs of rupees from 50 to 60 people on the pretext of making Portuguese passports for them and providing them with jobs abroad,” he said.