Dfyjkt

I overstayed in the UK for years and decided to leave the UK voluntarily. With my family's support, I am strong enough financially and I want to take over one of the businesses in the UK. Will my Tier 1 entrepreneur visa be rejected?

There are two reasons why your application may be rejected:

• Your ban has not yet passed.


• The respective embassy does believe that it is highly likely that you would stick to the rules if admitted again.

The duration of a ban depends on many factors (as it seems), including on which visa you were in the UK the last time, whether you left voluntarily, and who paid for your departure. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/immigration-rules/immigration-rules-appendix-v-visitor-rules contains some information. The minimum ban seems to be 12 months if you paid for your departure yourself. You can find the rules for other cases on that site as well.

However, even if your application may not be rejected due to a ban, there is still the question of whether the embassy will trust that you stick to the rules this time. This is the difficult part as overstaying for years looks very bad. If you want to have a chance, you need to collect conclusive evidence that overstaying will not happen again. Depending on why you overstayed the last time, this is difficult.

Having said that, you may want to get professional help here, which means hiring an immigration lawyer. An overstay of years is not a trivial matter, so someone experienced with such cases should be able to determine your chances in a better way.

From the UK government's website, if you're a non-EEA national, the length of time you might be banned for is as follows:

• 12 months if they left the UK voluntarily, not at the expense (directly or indirectly) of the secretary of state;


• 2 years if they left the UK voluntarily, at the expense (directly or indirectly) of the secretary of state, more than 2 years ago; and the date the person left the UK was no more than 6 months after the date on which the person was given notice of the removal decision, or no more than 6 months after the date on which the person no longer had a pending appeal; whichever is the later 5 years if they left UK voluntarily, at public expense;


• 5 years if they were removed from the UK as a condition of a caution issued in accordance with s.134 legal aid, sentencing and punishment of offenders act 2012


• 10 years if they were removed or deported from the UK;


• 10 years if they practised deception (which includes using false documentation) in support of a previous visa application

In your case where you left voluntarily using your own funds, a 12-month ban will likely be applied from the date you left.