Inpex drug dealer jailed

Cocaine sold to ‘hardworking, hard-living’ co-workers

A FORMER Inpex subcontractor who sold drugs to a group of co-workers will be banished from the Northern Territory for five years after serving a nine-month jail sentence.

Jonathan James Hunt, 29, was sentenced in the Supreme Court to three years in prison after pleading guilty to selling MDMA, cocaine and ketamine to other Inpex workers last year.

The court heard Hunt had been buying the drugs for his personal use and to onsell to a group of “hardworking, hardliving” friends who all worked at Inpex.

“It seems that the offender fell in with a group of young men, all of whom worked at Inpex and all of whom were recreational drug users – they shared a similar hardworking, hard-living lifestyle,” Justice Stephen Southwood said.

“The crown accepts that the drug contacts who were re- vealed by an examination of the offender’s mobile telephone were all Inpex workers who were the offender’s associates.”

The court heard the English-born Hunt bought a quantity of drugs from a group of English backpackers in Mitchell St shortly before he was pulled over by police on August 21.

A search of his car uncovered a clipseal bag contain- ing 0.15g of MDMA, white powder in a wallet on the passenger seat, another clipseal bag with four MDMA tablets and fragments weighing 8.5g, and a plastic bag containing a mixture of cocaine and ketamine weighing 5.58g.

Less than an hour later, police searched Hunt’s Bakewell home where they found a cryovac bag containing 96 MDMA tablets and partial pieces weighing 21.53g, a pink bowl containing a mixture of MDMA and ketamine weighing 0.97g and a quantity of cannabis seeds in his bedroom.

Also located in the bedroom was a “large quantity” of small, unused clipseal bags and a locked safe containing $9610 in cash, determined to be the proceeds of previous drug sales.

After ruling Hunt’s threeyear sentence be suspended after nine months, Justice Southwood ordered him to leave the Northern Territory within two days of his release and not come back for five years.

“No excuses of you entering the Northern Territory will be accepted,” he said.

“If you return to the Northern Territory ... I will restore the whole of the suspended part of your sentence.

“So there are no ifs or buts about it.”

With time already served Hunt will be out of jail and out of the Northern Territory by the end of June.