Karima Manji fraudulently received the equivalent of €100,000 in benefits intended for Inuit people. She was sentenced on Thursday after pleading guilty to fraud in February.
“Ms Manji victimized her own children… her own daughters who were seriously compromised by her crimes”said Mia Manocchio, a judge in Nunavut, Canada. The judge faced a case never before seen across the Atlantic: Karima Manji pleaded guilty to fraud in February after pretending her daughters were Inuit, which allowed her to collect more than 150,000 Canadian dollars (100,000 euros) in benefits for Inuit residents. She was sentenced on Thursday to three years in prison, which she will spend in a federal penitentiary.
According to the British daily The Guardian, Toronto resident Karima Manji sent documents in 2016 for her two daughters, Amira and Nadya, in order to obtain an Inuit identity card. The 59-year-old Canadian did indeed live in Iqaluit, the territory’s capital, in the 1990s, but her two daughters were born in Ontario and have no connection to the Inuit or the lands of Nunavut.
The application was thoroughly vetted by community members to ensure there were no fraudulent registrations, and Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI) approved the application. As a result, the two children, who were 18 at the time of the incident, received money from the Kakivak association, described in court documents as “an organization serving the Inuit […] which provides sponsorship funds to Baffin Inuit for education-related expenses”.
The fraudulent mother returned 130,000 Canadian dollars
Thus, between September 2020 and March 2023, Nadya and Amira received 158,254.05 Canadian dollars in benefits from organizations in Nunavut. Another sum of 64,413 Canadian dollars was pending for Amira Gill in spring 2023, but has not been paid. To date, the fraudulent mother has returned 130,000 Canadian dollars and still owes 28,254 Canadian dollars to the Kakivak association.
«[Cette affaire] should serve as a signal to any future Aboriginal claimant that false appropriation of Aboriginal identity in a criminal context will result in significant punishment.”said Mia Manocchio. Indeed, Canada faces from time to time fraudulent cases of citizens who claim to be of indigenous descent from the Natives. On the other hand, cases of fraud with the Inuit are much rarer.
Canada’s Inuit population, which numbers around 70,000 people, lives mainly in the north of the country.
