She lied to get her twin daughters Inuit status and is about to be sentenced for fraud. Again.
CBC
Noah Noah says he has no positive memories of Karima Manji, the woman who used his mother, Kitty Noah, to obtain Inuit identities for her twin daughters so she could gain access to funds only available to Inuit beneficiaries.
"She was really awful," Noah said of Manji during a CBC News interview in 2023 at his Iqaluit home.
Noah grew up in Iqaluit and was 11 when he and his siblings first encountered Manji in the 1990s. That's when his father, Harry Hughes, met Manji in Iqaluit and the two began dating. At around the same time, Hughes was diagnosed with leukemia. Noah says it was a difficult period for him and his six siblings, made worse by his feeling that Manji didn't really like them.
"I mean, at one point, I remember her saying that we all belonged in a sewer."
During his father's relationship with Manji, they all moved to Ontario. The couple never lived together and broke up shortly after the move. Hughes died in 1997, but his relationship with Manji was only the beginning of her involvement in the lives of the Noah family.
Earlier this year, she admitted to defrauding Inuit organizations of more than $158,000 for her twin daughters' education by saying they were born to Kitty Noah, who was Inuk, and that Manji was their adoptive mother.
Noah says his mother, who died last year, didn't have an easy life — she survived two bouts of lung cancer as well as being hit by a car, which he says left her with a brain injury.
When he told his mother about Manji's claims that she was the twins' birth mother, "she was just as flabbergasted" as he was.
Manji's deception ended when she pleaded guilty in February, and she's set to be sentenced in a Nunavut court on June 24.
While that would normally be the end of a case like this, much remains unresolved when it comes to Manji, including how the organizations she defrauded might try to recoup their losses. Legal documents obtained by CBC News that reveal a contentious divorce and disputes about properties worth millions have been reviewed by an expert, who suggests Manji still seems to be trying to maintain control of her numerous real-estate assets, even as she faces sentencing for her crimes.
As first reported last year by Iqaluit outlet Nunatsiaq News, Manji applied for Inuit status in 2016 on behalf of her twin daughters, Nadya and Amira Gill, then in their teens.
On the enrolment forms she submitted to Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI), the organization that maintains the Inuit Enrolment List under the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, Manji identified Kitty Noah as the girls' birth mother and stated that she was their adoptive mother.
Those applications were approved, granting the twins Inuit status and giving them access to organizations like Kavikak Association, which offers scholarships and business opportunities meant for Inuit.
But in actuality, Manji was Nadya and Amira's birth mother, and their father was her husband, Gurmail Gill. The couple also had an older son, Liam.
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