A shopkeeper has been handed a suspended jail term for selling illegal tobacco in Newcastle-under-Lyme.
According to a BBC report, retailer Jamal Mohammed pleaded guilty to 28 charges relating to the sale and supply of a stash with a street value of more than £21,000.
Trading Standards officers found the packets hidden in the ceiling of his shop, Newcastle Convenience Store. The 47-year-old from Stoke-on-Trent, was sentenced to six months in prison suspended for two years, stated the report.
The shopkeeper, from Stonor Street, in the Cobridge area, was also ordered to pay £3,487 when he appeared before North Staffordshire Justice Centre on Monday (6).
Officers from Staffordshire County Council’s trading standards service found the fake tobacco during two inspections in 2021. Mohammed was found selling packs of 20 cigarettes for £5 each when officers raided the shop, the council said.
“Illegal tobacco damages our communities and harms legitimate businesses and we will take action against traders who knowingly sell it, ” said Victoria Wilson, cabinet member with responsibility for trading standards at Staffordshire County Council.
The news comes after it was reported that a famous Ipswich tobacconist, MW Ashton, is forced to shut down, partly due to increased level of illegal tobacco trade.
Ipswich’s last tobacconist shop’s manager, Shirley Debenham says trading has been hit hard in recent times by falling numbers of smokers, lower footfall in the town centre and cash-strapped customers switching to cheaper contraband cigarettes, sold illegally “under the counter” elsewhere in the town.
Locals say word gets around about where cheaper cigarettes, brought in from abroad, are sold. The illicit trade continues despite the sizeable seizures and prosecutions made by Suffolk’s trading standards office, The Guardian stated.
Four men were convicted last year, two of whom were jailed, for selling illicit tobacco across multiple shops in Ipswich and Colchester, in a scheme thought to have evaded the payment of about £150,000 in excise duty, by bringing cigarettes and tobacco into the UK illegally.
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