Former councillor among ring jailed for £2m tobacco fraud

Some of the illicit tobacco seized by HMRC officials after a raid on a Co Fermanagh business park.placeholder image
Some of the illicit tobacco seized by HMRC officials after a raid on a Co Fermanagh business park.
A former councillor is among four men sentenced to prison as part of a tobacco fraud ring.

Two men have been jailed while two more had sentences suspended after illicit cigarettes and tobacco worth nearly £2m were seized in Northern Ireland and the Netherlands.

In December 2017, officers from the PSNI, HM Revenue and Customs and the National Crime Agency raided a business park in Roslea, Co Fermanagh, seizing 336 boxes of hand-rolling tobacco.

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CCTV images linked former local councillor Anthony McPhillips (62) of Ashvale Avenue, Roslea, and 67-yearold van driver Peter Hughes, of Legmoylin Road in Silverbridge, Co Armagh, to the illicit haul.

The men were seen driving off before HMRC and the police arrived, but 56-year-old Stephen McKenna, of Belfast’s Rinnalea Gardens, was arrested at the scene. McPhillips and Hughes were arrested by HMRC early the following year.

Analysis of McKenna’s seized phone linked him and a fourth man, 67-year-old Peter Martin, of Ballynaclosha Road, Silverbridge, to a haul of two million cigarettes Dutch police discovered in a lorry near a Rotterdam warehouse in August 2017, seizing them before they reached Northern Ireland.

All four men pleaded guilty to excise fraud and were sentenced at Belfast Crown Court on Thursday (3rd). McKenna was jailed for two and a half years, and McPhillips an 18-month stretch in prison. Hughes and Martin were each sentenced to 18 months, suspended for two years.

The total figure of the fraud came to £1.93m.

An HMRC spokesperson said: “Illicit tobacco undermines legitimate retailers, funds wider crime, and deprives our vital public services of around £2.2 billion a year.”

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