Flower firm driver denies part in drug smuggling operation
A man employed as a driver for a Shropshire-based flower company being used as a front for a drug smuggling operation has told a jury he was not part of the conspiracy.
David Thompson, 42, said had he known that drugs were involved while he worked for Baan Flower Trading at Market Drayton, he would have "walked away from the job".
At Birmingham Crown Court yesterday he denied knowingly bringing drugs back from Holland for either Baan Klootwijt or David North – the two ring leaders of the multi-million pound drugs plot .
Thompson, of Laburnam Avenue, Cannock, Ashleigh Watkin, 38, of Rowney Close, Loggerheads, near Market Drayton, Gary Davies, 37, of Overdale, Telford, formerly from Market Drayton, and Stuart Grant, 42, of Deansfield Road, Bearwood, all deny being involved in a conspiracy to smuggle cannabis into the UK between November, 2011 and February, 2013.
Watkin and Davies also deny being involved in the supply of cannabis during the same period.
At court yesterday Thompson said he had been recruited a few weeks before the police raided the flower company's warehouse at Adderley Road Industrial Estate on November 9, 2012.
Thompson claimed that he had become suspicious after an early trip to Holland about what may have been in some of the boxes.
Covert footage filmed outside a warehouse at Rijnsburg in Holland shows Thompson arriving in a refrigerated lorry and boxes being loaded along with trolleys' of fresh flowers.
He said that subsequent recorded conversations of him talking about smuggling cigarettes and the customs "only looking for immigrants and not what we have got" was just an attempt to get information from his bosses.
Thompson said that before his arrest he had looked for another job andthat working for the wholesale flower firm was "not his cup of tea".
But he accepted having been offered a new job he made two further trips inside a week to Holland for Baan Flower Trading because he had agreed to do it. He claimed £1,400 in cash handed to him by David North when he returned from Holland on the day of police raid was back pay he was owed.
The jury has heard that Klootwijk and North ran Baan Flower Trading as a front for the drug smuggling operation in which cannabiswas hidden among cartons of fresh flowers.
The trial continues
