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Tabloid News of Monday, 22 October 2001

Source: THE SUN

Ghanaian Jilts White Sugar-Mummy After Getting UK Papers

A British woman is reported to have been abandoned by her Ghanaian husband she met on a Shirley Valentine-style holiday – just One-month after he was granted UK residence permit. Distraught Rosalind Barnett, 53, in a fume told The Sun,: "He will be very sorry for the rest of his life if I ever get my hands on him."

A mother of three, Rosalind fought for three years to keep 33 year old Alexanda Kwesi Oware, in Britain. She even went all out to buy a dream ?120,000 pounds three-bedroom house for them to live in. The couple met six years ago while Rosalind was on holiday in the Gambia. Alexanda was then working as a maintenance officer at her hotel.

They stayed in touch and their relationship blossomed. After they married, Rosalind spent hours helping Alexanda fill out application forms to the Home Office. But five weeks after her "soul mate" was told he can stay in Britain he walked out and disappeared.

Rosalind, who is now taking medication for depression, sobbed: "I feel so used. I can’t believe that this has happened. I’m a nervous wreck. I thought we were both so in love." Clutching her now meaningless wedding and engagement rings, she described how they fell in love the way Pauline Collins’s character Shirley Valentine fell for a local on holiday in Greece in the hit 1989 film.

Rosalind explained: "We got on so well that just days after meeting him he asked me to marry him two or three times but I said no. "At the end of the five-week holiday I gave Alexanda ?100 to go back to his native country of Ghana and kept in touch with him regularly."

She added: "I made a lot of trips to Africa and frequently mailed him money because he had nothing and lived in a shack. "He was so charming and after several trips to Ghana I realised I was in love and did want to marry him." Rosalind wed six-foot-tall Alexanda at a register office in Ghana and got permission for him to come to the UK.

She spent three years helping Alexanda turn his temporary residency papers into a permanent residency and they bought a house in Basingstoke, Hants. But then he scarpered. Rosalind said: "As soon as the papers arrived he said the relationship wasn’t working and packed his bags. I suggested we go to Relate but he didn’t want to know.

"I tried to get him to come home and talk. He told me he was going back to Ghana. But since then I have seen him walking round Basingstoke. "He has left me the dog I bought him, but that’s about it. He has broken my heart. I helped him and this is how he repays me - I feel a fool."