Four Sentenced in £4.5 Million Cannabis Smuggling Operation Concealed in Gari Powder

A group of men has been jailed for a combined 26 years after attempting to smuggle £4.5 million worth of cannabis concealed in sacks of gari powder from Ghana into the UK. Border Force officers intercepted the operation at Tilbury Docks in south Essex as part of a National Crime Agency (NCA) investigation.

Border officers initially discovered the cannabis in a shipping container, which had arrived from Ghana in December 2019. The haul, weighing 1.5 tonnes and estimated to have a street value of approximately £4.3 million, was hidden in over 2,000 packages concealed within white hessian sacks of gari powder, a staple West African food. Following the discovery, authorities replaced the cannabis with dummy packages and monitored the shipment’s journey to north London.

On January 13, 2020, the container arrived in London, where Daniel Yeboah, of Homerton High Street, attempted to collect it, signing the delivery note with a fake signature. When he and his associates realized the cannabis was missing, they quickly abandoned the container and tried to escape in separate vehicles. NCA officers, tracking the operation, arrested all four individuals shortly after that.

The men sentenced include:

Daniel Yeboah, who received five years;

Edward Adjei, 48, of London Road, Grays, who received four years.

Text messages on Baidoo’s mobile phone provided evidence of his intention to receive the shipment at a north London yard, which he had rented under a false name to obscure his identity. Investigations further revealed that a bank account linked to Bonsu had been used to make payments for shipping the container from Tilbury Docks to the London yard.

According to NCA senior investigator Saju Sasikumar, the impact of the cannabis had it reached its intended market, would have been “catastrophic” for communities in the UK, fueling violence and exploitation through county lines drug trafficking. He emphasized the NCA’s commitment to dismantling such organized crime networks and ensuring those involved are held accountable.