Gurpreet Singh is alleged to have offered money to people willing to marry Indian migrants to secure residency.

A Whangarei restaurateur offered up to $40,000 for Kiwi women to marry Indian men so they could secure New Zealand visas, it's alleged.

Gurpreet Singh was the subject of a Stuff investigation, which last month revealed he charged Indian migrants up to $35,000 to secure questionable visas and fake jobs.

Now the former manager of his Whangarei diner, Killer Prawn, says Gurpreet offered her $40,000 to marry an Indian man. She says she rejected the offer outright.

Another former friend of Gurpreet's said he was several times offered a finder's fee if he could secure Kiwi women who would agree to the deal. He too declined.

And another former manager of the restaurant said he discussed plans to secure residency for Indian men by setting up sham marriages over drinks with Gurpreet.

Several attempts to contact Gurpreet and his wife Meha about these latest allegations were unsuccessful. When Stuff visited his Whangarei home last month to ask about earlier allegations, he asked reporters to leave his property.

Immigration New Zealand assistant general manager Peter Elms said they took any claims of partnership fraud "very seriously". The consequences for anyone involved would be "significant".

"We encourage anyone with information about such practices to contact us in confidence. There is no excuse for immigration fraud," he said.

"If there is information linking [Gurpreet] to immigration fraud, we would welcome that information and I'd encourage those people to contact us."

Immigration lawyer Alastair McClymont claimed Immigration NZ was now routinely declining partnership visas between Punjabi Indians and New Zealand citizens because so many sham relationships have been arranged.

"It's too hard for them to find a way to distinguish between the fake and the genuine so they've just started declining everybody," McClymont said.

Elms said Immigration NZ was "very aware" of partnership fraud but didn't target any ethnic group, instead assessing all relationships for "genuineness and stability" and investigating further where they had suspicions.

DAVID WHITE/STUFF Several sources said restarauteur Gurpreet Singh talked of a scheme to pay Kiwi women to marry migrant men.

Former Killer Prawn manager Chauntell Reid said Gurpreet made the offer to her to arrange a sham marriage either late last year or early this year while she was at work in the restaurant.

"He offered me about $40,000. He asked if I was interested, and I said 'hell-to-the-no ... and I don't think any of my friends are interested either'."

Reid said it was clear Gurpreet was serious about the offer, but she didn't get details because she closed the conversation down immediately.

"I just think he was trying to help his family. Obviously it's dodgy and illegal but I think his heart was probably in the right place - but I don't know him that well."

She has since left the business and is working at another Northland restaurant.

Another source, who was friendly with Gurpreet, said they were aware of that conversation and that Gurpreet also tried to recruit them to the scheme. The source said: "He [Gurpreet] was approaching [Killer Prawn] staff to find young Kiwi girls who were regulars at the weekends for the night life, to see if they would be willing to marry young Indian boys.

"We were offered a finder's fee of anywhere from 10 to 50 per cent, depending on how much he could charge for the visas. Thankfully, I didn't get involved: I never said an outright 'yes' or 'no', he just eventually stopped bringing it up with me.

"I thought it was very ballsy of him to try and induce staff members to commit immigration fraud. But he was never quiet [about what he did] with those in his circle. He was never quiet about the dodgy deals he had pulled off - he spoke so openly about immigration fraud."

DAVID WHITE/STUFF Inside the Killer Prawn restaurant, Whangarei.

​Karamjeet Singh, who worked as a manager at Killer Prawn in 2016 and claims he paid Gurpreet for a series of visas and a fake job with a Wellington IT company, says he remembers discussing the scheme with Gurpreet.

Karamjeet said Gurpreet discussed it with him and two others at Gurpreet's Weymouth house around two years ago. Gurpreet described it to the three men as "an easy way to get residency".

According to Karamjeet, Gurpreet told him he would "buy the ring and bring in the girls and stuff".

"At that time, he had Māori or Samoan girls, he had two options."

Megan Cammock, a former employee at a Hamilton pizza restaurant owned by Gurpreet, said he spoke "a few times" about marriages he arranged between New Zealand citizens and Indians for residency purposes.

"He was talking about a couple getting married, that he had helped get them together," she said.

McClymont said an exponential growth in sham marriages and other immigration scams could be traced back to a point in the early 2000s when New Zealand started promoting a one-year business degree as a pathway to residency.

Changing economic conditions in India had also played a part, McClymont said. A large growth in land values in the Punjab left many families with large inherited agricultural land assets that could be borrowed against.

New Zealand's export industry stepped into the breach and provided the prospect of residency to families who desperately wanted the social prestige of a foreign passport for their children.

Now some of these students, heavily in debt and misled about the usefulness of their degrees - which McClymont termed "worthless" - were trying to marry New Zealand citizens.

Marriages for visas have popped into public view over the years but McClymont believed a key difference now was that even some of the sham marriages had turned into real relationships with children and families deeply intertwined.

"It used to be just people paying money for fake documents but now it's changed where you actually have relationships but it's more like a sugar daddy relationship."

McClymont said the "sugar daddies" tended to be young Punjabi men in their twenties and their money was "literally coming from their sugar cane farms in the Punjab".

He believed Immigration NZ had no way to crack down on these type of relationships so was now using the "most absurd" reasons to decline applications.

McClymont alleged the crackdown was an attempt to get a message out that "every single Indian getting into a relationship with a Māori or Pacific Island woman is going to get declined".

And McClymont said a wider Immigration NZ crackdown threatened to not only break apart the families of those in "sugar daddy" relationships but also multiracial families who had done nothing wrong.

"There are genuine relationships, and when you've got a woman that comes in up from the Bay of Plenty with her Mum and Dad and says 'we want Jaswinder to come back from India because he's now part of our whanau', these are people who have long-term intentions to live together."