A crime boss who ran an illegal waste site has been jailed for four years, within a day of being released from prison for firearm offences.
Hugh O'Donnell laundered millions of pounds in profit by heading a business that dumped waste at a site near Reading between 2006 and 2008. The Environment Agency said it was the biggest court case it had ever brought, and described how O'Donnell took skips and lorry loads of construction and demolition waste into the Aldermaston site to be dumped in an illegal landfill.
During a raid by the Agency and Thames Valley Police on the illegal waste site in 2008, an unlicensed handgun, ammunition, stolen vehicles and more than £50,000 were seized. O'Donnell received a four and a half year prison sentence for possession of the firearm in 2009. He was released from prison on Thursday 23 June 2011 and was given his latest sentence for money laundering and waste offences the next day.
The Agency used advanced forensic techniques, including DNA, handwriting analysis, fingerprinting and mobile phone and laptop interrogation, to track the illegal business. O'Donnell, along with Peter Lavelle and Robert Evans admitted acquiring, using and possessing criminal property and depositing, controlled hazardous waste without a licence.
Sentencing the three men, Judge Edmonds, QC said, "This is deliberate and calculated offending on an industrial scale for profit. You carried on in spite of efforts to stop you and with the clear intention of making as much criminal profit out of the offences as you could before you were stopped." Environment Agency solicitor, Angus Innes, described their investigation as one the biggest and most complex ever undertaken. "This is a clear deterrent for others, and there are many of them, in the illegal waste industry that their activity will be closed down, their profits will be taken and they'll end up in jail if they don't stop."
For more information see:
