BREAKING NEWS: Gang cleared of exploiting migrant workers in leek-picking trial
A GANG who employed migrant workers from across Europe to pick leeks was today cleared of charges of exploiting them.
The group were alleged to have recruited the workers, promising them wages and accommodation, then putting them to work in harsh conditions.
But today at Northampton Crown Court, Gurdip Singh Somal, Jujhar Singh, Santokh Singh Nizzar, Varinder Singh, Fateh Singh Bal and Ania Jemiolo were all found not guilty of charges of conspiracy to exploit them, either by bringing them to the UK, or arranging travel within the UK.
Somal’s wife, Manjinder Kaur Somal, who also faced charges, was acquitted earlier in the trial, which began in December.
The defendants were arrested in November 2008 as part of Operation Ruby, the biggest operation of its kind targeting exploitation of migrant workers, when police swooped on Tingles Fields, near Spalding, Lincolnshire.
During the trial the court heard Gurdip Somal ran a multimillion-pound business, recruiting workers to harvest leeks in Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Cambridgeshire.
The prosecution alleged workers were herded by a harvesting machine and treated badly, forced to live in squalor.
Gurdip Somal, 52, his nephew Jujhar Singh, 27, both of Cleveland Avenue, Kettering, Northamptonshire and Jemiolo, 26, of Holly Road, Birmingham, were cleared of conspiracy to exploit by arranging travel to the UK.
Somal, Singh, and Nizzar, 50, of Leven Way, Coventry, Varinder Singh, 30, of Gladstone Drive, Tividale, Oldbury, West Midlands, and Bal, 25, of Havelock Street, Kettering, were all found not guilty of conspiracy to exploit by arranging travel within the UK.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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