Corrupt Cardiff Council staff jailed after accepting weekly bribes to dump cheap waste

Corrupt council staff have been jailed for taking bribes to allow waste to be cheaply dumped at a recycling centre in Cardiff.

The employees were given cash by the boss of a skip firm totalling around £1700 a week to under-weigh loads, a court heard.

Three of those involved in the scandal have been jailed, including two former Cardiff Council employees and the owner of the waste firm A&T.

The bribery operation was centred on Cardiff Council's Bessemer Close recycling centre and involved five council employees.

Warren Roberts, 56, of Birchwood Road, Penylan, Cardiff, was the owner of waste firm A&T and would deposit loads of waste on a regular basis and sometimes several times daily.

Roberts entered into a criminal arrangement with four employees of the council – Cesario Deabreu, Andrew Barnett, Anthony Miles and Joshua Hayman – to reduce the amount he was being charged for taking waste to the site, Swansea Crown Court heard.

The employees were given cash by Roberts totalling around £1,700 a week in return for under-weighing loads he was delivering and for mis-recording expensive mixed waste as simple loads of rubble and hardcore.

The court heard how straightforward loads of rubble or hardcore cost £30 per tonne to dump, but the fees for mixed waste are at least four times that.

As well as mis-recording and charging the types of waste coming into the site, the conspiracy also involved manually altering the results to under-weigh A&T lorries and not recording some deliveries at all.

The 14-month conspiracy meant A&T was "massively undercharged" for using the Bessemer Close site in Leckwith.

Roberts was described by the prosecutor as the "instigator" of the bribery conspiracy and his payments of around £1,700 were divided up among the employees involved in the scam.

Swansea Crown Court heard each member of staff had a different role in the conspiracy.

Deabreu was a weighbridge operator at the Bessemer site and was in daily text and WhatsApp contact with Roberts to coordinate the arrival of the skips and their onward processing.

Andrew Barnett had a supervisory role at Cardiff Council's Lamby Way recycling centre in Rumney and shared inside knowledge of issues which could affect their waste scam and he was able to feed back information to Roberts and Deabreu to help them avoid detection.

The prosecutor said though it was hard to be precise about figures it is believed Deabreu and Barnett were each taking a £500 cut from the weekly bribery pot.

The other two council employees played lesser roles in the conspiracy. Miles sorted incoming waste at the site and then move it around to the appropriate bays whilst Hayman was an agency worker who provided cover at the weighbridge.

The court heard the conspiracy started in November 2016 and came to an end 14 months later when a whistleblower who worked at the Lamby Way site reported their concerns to bosses.

Council investigators examined the computerised weighbridge system and compared what was recorded with CCTV footage.

They found that on numerous occasions the electronic read-outs of weight for A&T lorries had been manually overridden and lowered resulting in lower fees charged to the firm.

Police were then contacted and after the defendants were arrested their phones were seized and analysed.

Warren Roberts was sentenced to 28 months, Cesario Deabreu was sentenced to 22 months in prison and Barnett – who was convicted at trial and so received no credit for a guilty plea – was sentenced to 18 moths in prison.

Miles was sentenced to 14 months in prison suspended for 12 months and was ordered to complete 150 hours of unpaid work whilst Hayman was sentenced to nine months in prison suspended for 12 months and must complete 120 hours of unpaid work.

After the sentencing, a spokesperson for Cardiff Council said: "This was a serious fraud which saw three council employees that no longer work for Cardiff Council, and an agency worker, conspire with an external client for personal gain and to defraud the council.

"Now that the court case is over and reporting restrictions have ended the council can confirm that we alerted the police and have done everything that we could to aid the investigation."

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