Battery theft gang are spared prison terms
Court reporter CONTRACTORS who stole batteries from mobile phones masts they were paid to maintain because they thought it was a perk of the job have been spared jail.
Five men working for a firm which does maintenance work for Vodafone helped themselves to power packs worth thousands and sold them for scrap.
A court heard the workers stole dead batteries which had been left by the side of the masts as well as live ones which were in place as a back-up in case the mains power supply failed.
When fellow engineers discovered what was going on, those responsible were easily traced as there are tracking devices on the company vans they were using and some of the areas visited did not correspond to their work sheets.
An investigation showed batteries had been pinched from 17 sites across the North East and sold for scrap worth more than £15,000 over a period of around two months in 2015.
Now Paul Winter, Justin Milburn, Mark McKenna, Mark Hicks and Lee Easthaugh have all been given suspended prison sentences at Newcastle Crown Court after pleading guilty to conspiracy to steal.
Judge Tim Gittins told them: “You should have known this was more than just an apparent perk of the job and was out-and-out dishonesty.
“The ridiculous thing about your criminality is each of you were only getting a few hundred pounds, maybe a few thousand, and were risking not just your liberty but your employment, which was terminated, and your families’ welfare.
“For the sake of a few extra beers or, in some cases, a few extra lines of cocaine. For the sake of a few hundred pounds.”
The court heard the men formed one or two rigging teams employed by a sub-contractor to maintain the masts across the region.
Judge Gittins said: “The degree of trust placed in you in that sense, as workers in isolated locations often, unable to be closely supervised, was moderately high.
“Sometimes they were live batteries that were attached to the system as back-up should the main supply fail and sometimes they were disused, removed batteries.”
The scam came to light when engineers noticed the back-up batteries had been removed and steps had been taken, such as insulating wires, to try to prevent the mains supply failing. The court heard the men were not all involved in every act of theft and some made just a few hundred pounds while others made a few thousand.
Winter, 32, of Phoenix Court, Blackhill, Consett; Milburn, 37, of Surrey Crescent, Moorside, Consett; McKenna, 45, of Surrey Crescent, Moorside, Consett; Hicks, 45, of Alexandra Street, Consett and Easthaugh, 23, of York Road, Blackhill, Consett, all pleaded guilty to conspiracy to steal.
Winter also admitted separate charges of supplying cocaine and cannabis, which came to light when police examined his phone in relation to the other offence.
Winter was sentenced to two years, suspended for two years, with 300 hours unpaid work.
The others each got four months, suspended for 12 months, with 100 hours of unpaid work.
The court heard all five are family men and people speak highly of them in “glowing references”.