I picked up this newsletter in court the other day while hopping between different court rooms looking for interesting cases to report.
It features convictions and how much the offenders had to pay back in fines and confiscations. The front page story caught my attention because it is about a tobacco smuggling gang of five who got off quite lightly in terms of jail sentences, serving a total of six years between them.
The gang traded in an estimated 78 million cigarettes and evaded about £18 million in excise duty, according to HM Revenue and Customs.
Officers seized £20,000 found hidden beneath a chest of drawers by cash detection dog, Sniff, and another £199,000 found in two holdalls. A sum of £250,000 cash deposits, believed to be the proceeds of crime, was also seized.
The 2.1 million cigarettes were burned at a national power station to fuel the national grid. My reaction to this story was what a complete waste! If we didn't live in such an anti-smoking hysterical society, common sense would have dictated that if HM Revenue and Customs put those cigs back on legitimate sale then how much more would have gone back to the treasury than the money saved on the fuel that would have been used to create electricity?
I'm not entirely convinced that this "payback" method of recovering criminal assets is fair after a recent court case I attended in which a drug addict had to pay back £3,380 which he was believed to have made from thefts. He looked like he couldn't even afford a decent meal and admitted that he didn't have two pennies to rub together. Whatever he might have made was soon used up getting himself more amphetamines.
Because he had no money he was jailed for three months. He'd offered to pay this amount back at £5 per week but that offer was rejected because the magistrates said "there was a distinct lack of effort to resolve the matter."