Company boss jailed over £20-million drug import bid

Simon Dunmore tried smuggling shipments of drugs in to the UK from Holland. Credit: West Midlands Police

A catering company boss who turned to dealing ecstasy and cannabis to make ends meet following the reported failure of his business has been jailed.Police say drugs worth around £20 million were intercepted at parcel depots as part of their investigations.

Simon Dunmore tried smuggling shipments of the cannabis variation known as 'skunk' and 70kg of MDMA Hydrochloride – the ‘raw material’ used in ecstasy tablets – into the UK from Holland, via Coventry Airport.

Seven packages were seized by border force officials on the 19th and 21st May last year destined for Dunmore’s business address in Harborne Road from where he supplied food to cafes, local businesses and conferences.

More drugs consignments were found elsewhere, addressed to a firm called WeTakeAnyBox.Com who were trading from the same Birmingham premises. They were intercepted at DPD’s parcel depot in Oldbury.The packages were found to contain more than 100,000 ecstasy tablets – and when the 41-year-old arrived in a van to collect the packages on 31 July, West Midlands police officers were waiting to arrest him.

Dunmore, from Saint Mary’s Row in Moseley, claimed his WTAB.Com business stored items for people unable to collect them in person or who had no warehousing space.But further police enquiries showed just seven log-ins over a five-month period to the company’s website – set up only weeks before the first drugs were seized – while there were no storage facilities at the Harborne Road head quarters.

Dunmore couldn’t provide a contact name or number for the person he said ordered the drug packages but suggested he received a call from the client on 28 July.However, detectives were able to prove he was on a family holiday in Cornwall at the time he claimed to have been chatting on an office landline to the customer.He went on to admit six counts of importing drugs and at Birmingham Crown Court was jailed for a total of nine years.

Police say drugs worth around £20 million were intercepted at parcel depots as part of their investigations. Credit: West Midlands Police.

Investigating officer, Detective Constable Richard Simpson, said:

Police say Dunmore came up with several explanations to try and distance himself from the drugs and later set up a bogus business in an attempt to position himself as a middleman.Commentating on the outcome, West Midlands Police said the severity of the jail sentence handed to him shows how seriously the courts view this kind of activity.Dunmore was of previous good character.