‘Foot soldier’ jailed over passports plot
EUROPEAN ARREST WARRANT SERVED NINE YEARS AFTER OFFENCES
A ‘FOOT soldier’ in a criminal gang which helped people from Albania try to enter the UK using other people’s passports has been jailed.
Irmantas Zvybas, now 30, travelled to Italy and France on separate occasions to meet two Albanian nationals he didn’t know.
He would then return to the UK with them after handing over a legitimate passport belonging to someone else ‘who bore physical similarities’ to them, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said.
The trips to Genoa and Paris happened back in 2011, when Zvybas lived in Cheetham Hill, in Manchester’s Lithuanian community.
Manchester Crown
Court heard he was offered £400 as ‘expenses’ for the trips.
The first trip was apparently successful, after Zvybas flew out to Genoa from Stansted Airport on March 28, 2011, and returned the following day.
Zvybas’ barrister Richard Simons said it was ‘quite remarkable, if not a little concerning, on the first occasion it was successful.’
Then on May 21, 2011, Zvybas flew from Liverpool to Paris and returned to the UK via Luton Airport, where he was questioned by border officers.
The man who had travelled with Zvybas admitted he had tried to enter the UK illegally and had no entitlement to be in the country. Zvybas was not arrested and was released, having been led to believe there would be no further prosecution, the court was told.
It was almost a decade later when justice caught up with him.
He was arrested at Riga Airport in Latvia ‘out of the blue’ while on holiday with his family after a European arrest warrant, originally issued almost nine years earlier, was executed.
The judge said Zvybas has ‘simply got on with his life,’ having since got married and becoming a father while working across Europe, including in Sweden.
He was extradited back to the UK in October and was remanded at Strangeways prison. The NCA said neither of the two people who accompanied Zvybas back to the UK were granted entry.
Now Zvybas has been jailed for 10 months, having pleaded guilty to two counts of assisting unlawful immigration. It is thought that due
Judge Nicholls to the amount of time Zvybas has served in prison, he will shortly be deported to Lithuania and back to his family.
Sentencing, Judge Elizabeth Nicholls described Zvybas as a ‘foot soldier’ in the plot, saying he wasn’t a ‘simple courier,’ but he also wasn’t a ‘prime mover.’
The judge said: “The conduct was unsophisticated and in one sense in plain view of the border authorities. The man who appears before me is very different from the 21-year-old who committed these offences.”
After the hearing, Charles Lee, operations manager at the NCA, said: “Organised immigration crime undermined UK borders and the legitimate economy, and puts pressure on public services.
“Irmantas Zvybas provided a full criminal service to individuals attempting to enter the UK illegally.
“He corruptly-acquired legitimate passports, delivered them to customers abroad, and then personally accompanied those individuals as they tried to circumvent UK border security.”