A gardener in a professional cannabis farm worth hundreds of thousands of pounds is in prison facing deportation.
Reports of the whiff of cannabis led police to a home on Balmoral Avenue, Billingham.
Officers smelled the drug through the door and saw high-powered lights on May 16.
They forced their way in and found 210 plants in three growing areas in the house.
Prosecutor Jenny Haigh said it was a professional set-up and a “substantial commercial enterprise” with blacked-out windows, extraction ducting, filters and time switches.
The electricity supply had been tampered with to power the farm, Teesside Crown Court was told on Friday.
The crop could have yielded between £58,800 and £176,400 worth of the Class B drug, probably towards the higher amount.
If restocked, it could have produced cannabis worth up to £529,200 in three crops, the court was told.
Vietnamese man Than Va Ha was arrested at the home and confessed to looking after the plants.
The illegal immigrant said he thought it was legal and it was accepted he played a “lesser role”.
Ms Haigh said he would be subject to automatic deportation.
Ha pleaded guilty to producing cannabis and abstracting electricity.
He claimed he was 17 and provided a false identification document to prove it. The Home Office checked it and the fingerprint given on the document was found not to be his.
Assisted by an interpreter, he was in court to be sentenced as an adult, though he still insisted he was 17.
Zoe Passfield, defending, said Ha was exploited and naive and had limited understanding of English.
She said he was free to come and go while at the Billingham house, but had nowhere else to go, no support network and no other source of income.
She added: “His involvement was limited to watering and feeding the plants. He received some payment for his services.”
She told how Ha’s problem was accepting that ignorance of the law was not a defence.
She said: “He maintained throughout that he had been told and he believed that what he was doing was allowed in the UK.”
On the day of a scheduled trial, he finally accepted that this would inevitably fail in front of a jury.
Judge Deborah Sherwin said: “It was clearly a substantial affair.
“The likely yield from the plants could have been into hundreds of thousands of pounds.”
She jailed Ha for 10 months.
The court heard he had already served more than the equivalent of that prison term remanded in custody.
He will be held until the UK Border Agency deports him.
No comments:
Post a Comment