A plumber who escaped hardship in Greece has been jailed for his role in trafficking illegal immigrants along the A14.
Ioannis Ballas, 33, has been locked up for two years after being caught red-handed with a van and three people who had been smuggled into the UK – including a 14-year-old Albanian boy – by the A14 at Newmarket on September 20.
The immigrants had arrived by lorry into the country that very day and Ballas’ job was to pick them up from next to the A142 and move them on to an unknown location, Cambridge Crown Court heard.
Recorder John Foy QC, sentencing, said: “It was a planned organisation, it has all the signs of that, and you were an integral part of that by supplying your services as a driver.
“You were a small cog, but you were a cog nonetheless.”
He said there was “great public concern” in the country over illegal immigration and it was “too easy” for those running these operations to get people like the defendant to do these jobs.
He said: “The word needs to get round, if it hasn’t already, that responding to these requests will result in prison sentences.”
Ballas, a self-employed plumber from Enfield who moved to this country from Greece as the scale of its debt emerged in 2009, admitted attempting to facilitate the commission of a breach of UK immigration law, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.
He is likely to serve half of his sentence in prison and the remainder on licence and will be able to remain in the UK.
Gavin Pottinger, mitigating, said his client was doing a favour for a friend and it was “certainly a one-off” adding he played no part in the organisation or the smuggling of the people into the country.
He said: “The role he was to play was quite simply driving from one place to another and he did not even get to carry out that role.”
He added: “He is a hard-working, honest man who has fallen prey to another and he has acted extremely naïvely.”
The adult illegal immigrants have been removed from the country, but it is understood the boy is still in care in the UK.
The criminals behind the operation have not been caught.