A British man has been jailed after stealing 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs a few weeks before Easter, British media report.
Joby Pool, 32, from Tingley, near Leeds, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison by Shrewsbury Crown Court on Thursday after he was found guilty of breaking into an industrial unit in Telford, Shropshire, on the evening of 11 February and using a stolen tractor to haul away a trailer containing the chocolate goodies.
Pool was later stopped by police while driving northwards on the M42 and is reported to have surrendered to the authorities "with his hands up". His loot had an estimated worth of £31,000, or €36,000.
Prosecutor Owen Beale argued that Pool had planned the heist well in advance and that others were almost certainly involved. "This clearly wasn't spur-of-the-moment offending, if I can put it like that, because he had taken with him a tractor unit and he had to know that the load was there in the first place," he explained. "This is clearly an organised criminal matter. You don't just happen to learn about a trailer with that kind of value being available."
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Beale's reasoning was accepted by Judge Anthony Lowe. "If one looks at what must have happened here, we are looking at a significant degree of planning," he said. "There must have been inside information... to identify the trailer and [see] if it was worth taking."
"I don't know what you intended to do with the trailer," he added.
