The former professional footballer was caught working as a gardener on a marijuana farm after being smuggled into the UK. When police raided the house on a residential street in Swansea, they found that the entire property had been given over to drug production, with Elsion Koka, an Albanian national, handling the harvest. The seized drugs are estimated to have a potential value of around £125,000.

Swansea Crown Court heard Coke paid a criminal gang a “significant” sum of money to bring him to the UK, part of the journey was made in the trunk of a vehicle and he hoped to find work in the construction. on arrival. Prosecutor Craig Jones said Swansea Police carried out a search warrant on a house in Stanley Terrace, Mount Pleasant, on 5 September last year. He said police raided the property and found that two ground floor rooms and four upstairs rooms had been converted for growing cannabis and that the electricity meter had been bypassed.

In total, police found 289 plants of various maturity levels and a drug expert estimated the potential yield of the plants could be up to 24kg with a street value of up to £125,000. Defendant Koka was also in the house. He was arrested, interrogated and answered “no comment” to all questions.

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The 26-year-old, from Stanley Terrace, Mount Pleasant, Swansea, has admitted to producing cannabis. No previous convictions. Hyvel Davies, mitigating, said the defendant came to the UK to earn money to send his family to Albania. He said an element of coercion and pressure was applied to Coke, but he then “recklessly and incorrectly” interpreted the offense as a way to raise funds for his mother and sister, a decision he now regrets. The lawyer said that he was far from the position he now occupies and that his client had been a professional football player for some time and was a very educated person with a master’s degree in sports science. He said that, due to Koka’s immigration status, it was accepted that an immediate prison sentence was inevitable and that, upon his release, he wanted to “return or be sent back” to Albania, where he hopes to become a personal trainer. .

Judge Hugh Rees said the defendant’s statement appeared to have paid a “significant sum of money” to a gang who had brought him to the UK on condition they found him to work in the construction industry, but instead took him for a house in Swansea. . The judge said the defendant had come to the UK for financial reasons, noting that his activities in the UK were “not consistent with his former good character”.

With a quarter discount for pleading guilty, Coke was sentenced to 16 months in prison. He will serve half of that time in custody before being released on leave. The judge said any future deportation to Albania was a matter for the Ministry of the Interior, noting that the National Referral Mechanism was investigating whether the defendant had been a victim of human trafficking.

Source: Wales Online