Citizenship and Immigration committee  We are processing both at the moment. We're processing primarily old cases, because we have such a large backlog, but we're processing some of the new cases as well, to get both cases in process.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I suppose we're doing about twice as many old cases as new ones at the moment.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's certainly clear to us that it is organized, because there are patterns that we see, and that's what we use to identify the fraudulent cases. Quite frankly, we have numerous admissions from persons we have refused, who tell us that they paid $40,000 to $60,000 to an organizat

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It is difficult to make that conclusion at this point, given that we still have the large inventory of cases. We have almost 16,000 investor cases in our backlog. The oldest go back to 2008. We process the oldest cases first, so we will be processing fewer cases this year than we

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In terms of fraud, our primary concern is the source of the money that they have. Given the very rapid development of the economy in China in the past 20 years, there are persons who have attained their wealth through unsavoury means, so our principal objective is making sure tha

Citizenship and Immigration committee  —those that are left over will take longer to process.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's very hard to say. It depends entirely on what our target is next year.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Frankly, I'd be very surprised if they went back up to the numbers of the first half of 2010. As I mentioned, we're now averaging about 300 a month. There may be further increases, but I really don't believe that they will get out of hand the way that they were before the morator

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Actually, the refusal rate is going down. In 2010 it was 47%, and we expect it will slowly continue to go down.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It has been higher in the last two years, but because we have been very vigilant, we are now receiving fewer applications in that category. It's not the legitimate cases who are no longer applying; it's the ones who now understand it is more difficult to fool us.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are two reasons that we check on the provenance of funds for investors. One is to determine whether the applicant meets the definition of an investor, so we have to determine how they obtained their money and whether it was on the basis, again, of meeting the requirement of

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In 2010 it was 1,375 visas and for 2011 it's 560.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, the average processing time for parents in 2010 was about 22 months. I expect those we complete in 2011, since we're still dealing with the same caseload, would be in that same range, but since we have more cases in process than we can visa this year, next year the processing

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I should have mentioned in my opening comments that the office here in Hong Kong does not deal with visitor visa applications from China on a regular basis. We opened four visa application centres in China in July 2008 and we have a contract with a private service provider that t