A FORMER Thames Water worker disguised his van using the water board’s livery in order to make it easier for him to courier cocaine during lockdown.

Christopher Wood, 35, of East Hanney, near Wantage, was said by prosecutors to have handled an estimated 22-and-a-half kilos of the class A drug between March 16 and June 12, 2020 – as well as half a million pounds in cash.

The conspiracy was organised over Encrochat, an encrypted telephone network sometimes dubbed the criminals’ WhatsApp. When that network was cracked by French police in 2020 the ringleaders of the conspiracy shut down their operations and fled abroad.

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Prosecutor Walton Hornsby told Oxford Crown Court on Wednesday that Wood’s role was ‘to receive the drugs for others to deliver them’.

“He is trusted to the extent of being asked to taste the drugs for their purity at one point,” he added.

“He has two vehicles, one of which he buys. It is a van, he has livery from Thames Water, for whom he worked at one point, effectively to disguise or to distract police attention.

“He is clearly acting under the instructions of those higher up.”

The leaders of the conspiracy, including one man named in court as Andrew McMahon, shut down the operation when they realised in the summer of 2020 that the Encrochat network had been compromised.

The kingpins were said to have fled with their families first to a safe house in Cheltenham then, later, abroad. They were ‘last thought to be in Portugal’, Mr Hornsby said.

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Defending, David Wood said his client acknowledged he had taken the ‘profoundly stupid decision to involve himself in this activity for a relatively short period of time and has had the good sense to admit his guilty as early as possible’.

The defendant was ‘well aware’ that even with the discount to his sentence to which he was entitled, having pleaded guilty at an early stage, he was looking at many years behind bars.

He had no previous convictions, was married with five children. Two of his children had ‘significant’ health problems and the couple had a newborn who arrived in January this year.

Bailing him to return to court for sentence on June 10, Judge Michael Gledhill QC warned Wood: “You know as well as anybody else in this court [that] even though you’ve pleaded guilty to this serious offence and however substantial your mitigation is that it is inevitable that you are going to receive an immediate custodial sentence.”

The judge ordered pre-sentence reports from the probation service.

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