Thieves pinch £140k of building equipment for Newport hotel

Thieves broke onto the site of The Royal Victoria Hotel on St Mary’s Street in Newport and took the equipment. This included specialist attachments needed for working on the building, between 1pm on Saturday and Monday morning.

Today bosses offered a £5,000 reward to anybody who offers information leading to a conviction.

Ian Musto, of Haywood Crushing Demolition, said: “These people loaded the equipment onto a lorry and basically just disappeared.

“It affected us for two or three days. We’ve got other equipment in our fleet, but it caused problems. This isn’t stuff you can replace by just going to the builder’s merchants. You’ve got to source it, get different brackets to fit different machines.

“Some of the equipment that was taken had finance on it. The finance will be paid off through the insurance, but then you renew your policy and it’s loaded.”

Mr Musto said that he believed it had been heavily planned.

“A neighbour had installed a motion sensitive camera in his garden so that he could capture the demolition. Whoever did it must have had it all sussed out. That went missing on Wednesday – then all of this happens.”

Constable Lee Thomas, of Newport’s safer neighbourhood team, said: “This is the sort of thing where there would have been noise. Did anybody hear any of these machines? If anybody has information, please call us on 101.”

This is the latest in a number of thefts from building sites that have been reporte in the Newport area.

A Hitachi mini digger was taken from an industrial estate in the town earlier this month and A key safe was smashed off to gain access to the site office, after which thieves could gain access to the mini digger which was then stolen. in April, three people were arrested after neighbours heard suspicious noises coming from a nearby building site.

Officers were called to the Meadow Road and Audley Avenue areas of the town and a 16-year-old boy, an 18-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl were arrested nearby on suspicion of burglary.

Constable Thomas said at the time: ““Local residents are our eyes and ears and we simply could not do our job without their help and support.

“Hopefully these latests arrests will reassure our local communities that if they do reports incidents to the police, then we will follow matters up and take the necessary actions.”