As illegal Channel crossings soar, jail for... The Frenchman who launched 39 migrant dinghies
A FRENCH boat merchant has been jailed for selling dozens of vessels to desperate migrants who used them to cross the English Channel.
Emmanuel Desreux, 45, sold 39 inflatable boats to migrants to navigate across the world’s busiest shipping lane to Britain.
He was given 18 months behind bars with another 18 on licence, and his taxi driver accomplice Jean- Claude Demeyer, 54, was sentenced to a year in prison with another year suspended.
It came as official figures revealed more migrants have been picked up trying to cross the Channel this month than in the crisis month of December.
French police began investigating when they arrested four Iranians and two taxi drivers on a beach near Calais in January. The arrests led them to Desreux and his boat firm, Fluvialys, in the town of Deulemont at the border with Belgium.
When the secondhand boatseller was arrested police found £12,300 in his car and he was charged with abetting illegal migration across the Channel between October 2018 and March this year.
During this period there was a spike in attempted crossings by Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi and African migrants. Iranian migrants living in a camp in Calais said the warmer weather had encouraged them to save cash by pooling their money to buy a dinghy rather than pay huge sums to smugglers.
Mohsen, 33, an English language teacher from Tehran, said: ‘When it is warmer they feel safer, more comfortable, so many more want to try the trip than in the cold.
‘It can be £10,000, £11,000 each to pay a smuggler but it is £5,000 for a boat which can take ten or 12 people. The boat would be cheaper but French people charge migrants more because they know they can double the price because we are desperate and it is illegal.’
According to the Fluvialys website, Desreux, pictured, created the secondhand boat company in 2009 and is responsible for the sale, transport and maintenance of small cruisers and dinghies. Neither of the convicted men expressed any remorse for the risks the migrants ran.
‘Everything depends on the weather,’ Desreux told the court in Boulogne-surmer. ‘When it was bad weather, I told them to call back later.’
It came after eight men travelling towards the UK in a small boat were intercepted by a Border Force vessel on saturday morning. This brought the total picked up in May to 140, compared to 138 in December when a ‘ major incident’ was declared. Of the men intercepted on saturday, seven said they were Iranian and the eighth Afghan. On Friday, 18 migrants including women and children were caught off the Kent coast. They were crammed into a dinghy and presented themselves as Iraqi and Iranian. All the migrants picked up over the weekend were medically assessed before being sent to be interviewed by immigration officials.
The Home Office is expecting many more to attempt the journey over the summer as the temperatures rise and the sea becomes calmer.
December was unseasonably mild and the spike in boats making the crossing prompted Home secretary sajid Javid to fly home early from a safari holiday in south Africa and deploy two additional Border Force vessels in the Channel. Yesterday the Ministry of Defence confirmed that two migrants had travelled to the UK on the undercarriage of a coach carrying British Army officers. They are believed to have approached the bus while it was waiting to board a Brittany Ferries service from Cherbourg to Portsmouth.
They hid beneath the vehicle as it crossed the Channel and drove 80 miles to a barracks in Oxfordshire. The MoD said: ‘We are aware of an incident at Dalton Barracks. The matter was rapidly dealt with.’
‘They feel safer when it’s warmer’