R v Lavdrim Voka

By leave of the single judge the appellant appeals against a sentence of 15 years' imprisonment imposed by His Honour Judge Martin Jackson for two counts of conspiracy to supply class A drugs (counts 1 and 3 on the indictment) following pleas of guilty entered by the appellant on 15 November 2024 in the course of his trial along with six co-conspirators.

At the sentencing hearing on 19 December 2024, Judge Jackson made an order under section 4(2) of the Contempt of Court Act prohibiting publication of the appellant's sentence until the return of the last verdict in the proceedings in order to avoid contamination of the jury hearing the trial against the remaining defendants. A retrial has been ordered in the case. That is, we are told, proceeding and therefore the prohibition order shall continue and shall apply to these proceedings in the same terms.

The facts giving rise to the appellant's convictions and to this appeal are as follows. In the period of count 1 on the indictment, that is 26 March 2020 to 31 May 2020, the appellant took on the role of a significantly trusted courier for a man operating under the EncroChat handle of "RegentIce" and in that period he was regularly delivering multiple-kilo quantities of cocaine for RegentIce across the country, up to Liverpool, into the Midlands and sometimes it seems also undertaking deliveries down into the London area.

Also, he was asked to collect or deliver significant quantities of cash, frequently tens of thousands of pounds, sometimes as much as £160,000-odd. As the learned judge noted in his sentencing remarks, the appellant was somebody who was important to the operation of the Organised Crime Group. He was trusted by people above him in the organisation to undertake those deliveries and he was provided with an EncroChat device which he used under the handle of "DillCanary". He was involved in the wholesale professional criminality. The total amount of cocaine with which the appellant was involved was estimated to be 63.5 kilograms.

The EncroChat system was broken by the French authorities in the summer of 2020 but the appellant continued to be involved in such activity because on 13 November 2020, he was then tasked with transporting five kilos of cocaine to a man called Andrew Cousins, a lorry driver who was ultimately stopped at Liverpool docks as he was about to drive out of the country. This was count 3 on the indictment.

The appellant was arrested on 18 December 2020, not for the present offences but for further offences which came to light when officers conducted a search of his home address outside Coventry. These further offences came to be tried at Warwick Crown Court. The appellant's co-defendant in the Warwick matter, Alfred Pisha, had driven to the appellant's home address when he was detained by officers who recovered from the boot a number of vacuum-packed bags containing a total of four-and-a-half kilos of cannabis valued at £18,000. The officers also arrested the appellant. A search of his home disclosed (1) 173 grams of cocaine (value £7,000) and (2) four empty packets with handwritten words and numbers on them consistent with having been used to store cocaine. An Italian driver's licence in the name Frederick Salliu bearing the appellant’s photographs was found on the appellant's person. A search of an outbuilding disclosed two rooms that had been constructed and fitted out with hydroponic equipment and were growing 399 cannabis plants with an estimated lower yield of between £44,000 and £55,000 and an upper yield of between £162,000 and £223,000.

The following day, 19 December 2020, the appellant was charged with four offences: count 1, possession of cocaine with intent to supply; count 3, being concerned in the supply of cannabis; count 4, production of cannabis; and count 5, possession of a false document (that is the false driving licence).

The appellant appeared at the Crown Court at Warwick on 8 January 2021 for a pre-trial preparation hearing where he entered pleas of not guilty to all counts, save for count 5 to which he pleaded guilty.

Whilst on remand at HMP Birmingham for the Warwick matter, the appellant was interviewed on 23 February 2021 on suspicion of the conspiracies to supply cocaine (the present matters). He was charged on 12 March 2021 and on 19 April 2021 he appeared in the Crown Court at Worcester for a plea and trial preparation hearing when not guilty pleas were entered on his behalf. Thus by 19 April 2021 the appellant faced two sets of proceedings to both of which he had pleaded not guilty: the present proceedings pending in the Crown Court at Worcester and the Warwick matter pending in the Crown Court at Warwick.

Whilst consideration was given to severing the appellant from the Warwick matter and adding that matter to the Worcester proceedings, that course was decided against. On 10 June 2021 prosecution counsel in the Warwick matter entered the following comment on the Digital Case System:

This was followed by a note of His Honour Judge Burbidge on 16 September 2021:

The Warwick matter accordingly proceeded to trial in November 2022. On 16 November 2022 the appellant was convicted by the jury. On the same day he was sentenced by His Honour Judge Potter to a total of 10 years' imprisonment. The lead offence was considered by the learned judge to be the cultivation of cannabis (count 4). For possession of cocaine with intent to supply a concurrent sentence of seven years was imposed.

The appellant obtained leave to appeal the sentence of 10 years on count 4 which came before this court on 17 May 2023. His appeal was dismissed. The court considered that Judge Potter had been justified in placing the offence in category 1 for the purpose of the sentencing guideline and therefore in adopting a starting point of eight years. In relation to the overall sentence of 10 years, the court stated:

Sentencing the appellant for the present offences, the learned judge considered that they fell outside the parameters of the sentencing guidelines because of the quantity of drugs involved. He said:

Accepting that the appellant was not at the top of the tree, but very close to it, and bearing in mind the appellant's role and the use of EncroChat devices, the learned judge considered that an appropriate starting point if convicted after trial would be 19 years. Giving an arguably generous discount of five per cent for plea, he reduced the starting point to 18 years.

The learned judge then considered the interplay between these offences and the Warwick matter and the need to adjust the sentence to take account of the sentence already being served. In this regard he said:

On behalf of the appellant Mr Lally, for whose written and oral submissions we are grateful, has submitted that the learned judge failed to have sufficient regard to the appellant's sentence in the Crown Court at Warwick on 16 November 2022 that involved similar offences committed in the same year and the overlap of the offences before the Crown Court at Worcester and that he failed to reflect the totality of the appellant's offending during the relevant period. He submits that the learned judge failed to give adequate consideration to the Sentencing Council's totality guideline which enjoins the court to have regard to the totality of the offender's criminality when passing the second sentence "to ensure that the total sentence to be served is just and proportionate." He submits that the appellant is in effect serving a sentence of 25 years and little or no attention was paid to the fact that the Worcester sentence was for offences pre-dating the Warwick offences. Furthermore, there was an overlap in the time of the offending and the offences were in relation to class A and class B drugs. He asks this court to look at the position as it should have been had all the offences been sentenced at the same time and what the totality would then have been.

In our judgment the appropriate approach is to consider what the effect of the sentence is that the learned judge actually imposed and compare that to the sentence that might reasonably have been imposed in November 2022 had all the offences been dealt with at the same time.

So far as the effect of the sentence actually imposed is concerned, the sentence of 15 years imposed by the learned judge started to be served only when that sentence was passed, that is on 19 December 2024. By that time the appellant had served just over two years of the Warwick sentence but he was also entitled to credit in relation to that sentence for the time served when remanded in custody which had been since 21 December 2020. Thus the appellant had served effectively four years of his 10-year sentence by 19 December 2024.

Assuming that he would have been entitled to release on licence after serving half his sentence, he would have expected to be released in December 2025 from the Warwick sentence. The effect of the sentence of 15 years was to extend the release date from December 2025 to June 2032, that is seven-and-a-half years from the date that the sentence was passed, an additional six-and-a-half years.

What sentence is this equivalent to if passed in November 2022? Given that the appellant was entitled to just under two years credit for time spent on remand as at November 2022, release in June 2032 would have required him to have received a sentence of 23 years. Release after half would have meant release after eleven-and-a-half years in custody, that is in June 2034, less the two years spent on remand giving release in June 2032.

We therefore disagree with the submission made on behalf of the appellant that he is now serving the equivalent of a sentence of 25 years. We consider he is serving the equivalent of 23 years.

The next question is whether a sentence of 23 years would, in November 2022, have been manifestly excessive for the totality of the appellant's offending. We note that in this regard eight of the ten years imposed by His Honour Judge Potter at Warwick Crown Court in November 2022 related to the lead offence of cultivation of cannabis. This was increased by only two years to take account of the other offending, including the possession of class A drugs with intent to supply. Thus it seems to us that the overlap between the Warwick offending and the Worcester offending is relatively small.

Contrary to Mr Lally's submission to us today, we consider that given the scale of the Worcester offending the court would have been quite entitled to impose consecutive sentences for the cultivation of cannabis and the conspiracy to supply class A drugs. In our view although both involving unlawful drugs under the Misuse of Drugs Act they are in fact quite different in nature.

In the present case Judge Jackson considered that a sentence of 18 years' imprisonment would have been appropriate for the conspiracies and we endorse that view. In effect the additional sentence for the Warwick offences would only have needed to be an additional five years to give the 23-year equivalent sentence. That would have been a discount of 50 per cent for totality from the sentence which this court has already ruled was a reasonable sentence for the Warwick offences.

Standing back and considering the totality of the appellant's offending, we consider that a sentence of 23 years, although towards the upper limit, would not have been a sentence which could be described as manifestly excessive. It follows that the sentence of 15 years imposed in this case has not resulted in a sentence which is manifestly excessive and for these reasons the appeal is dismissed.