Aldermaston waste crime boss must repay £917,000

Jailing Hugh O’Donnell for four years last June, Judge Martin Edmunds QC branded the illicit operation in the village “deliberate, calculated offending on an industrial scale.”
At Isleworth Crown Court this week O’Donnell was ordered to repay his ill-gotten gains within six months or face a further four-and-a-half years in jail under the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA).
The sum represents the largest POCA ruling the Environment Agency (EA) has secured against any individual to date.
A three-year EA investigation ended in 2009, when environmental crime officers, alongside police, arrested O'Donnell and two accomplices.
With the assistance of Thames Valley Police, the agency raided the illegal waste site at Aldermaston - which spread over land the size of five football pitches - in October 2008, seizing an unlicensed handgun and ammunition, other weapons, stolen vehicles, plant equipment and more than £50,000 in cash.
O'Donnell, now aged 65 and who lived in Reading, was subsequently imprisoned in 2009 for four-and-a-half years for possession of the illegal firearm, which was recovered following an EA search.
He was subsequently sentenced to four years in prison for money laundering and 22 months for waste offences, to be served concurrently.
His accomplices Robert Evans, aged 59, and Peter Lavelle, aged 28, both from Reading, were also jailed.
Judge Edmunds said at the time: “You carried on in the teeth of attempts to stop you, and with the clear intention of making as much criminal profit as you could before you were stopped.
“The attitude shown to the enforcement authorities was dismissive and obstructive.”
Restraint orders, preventing the disposal of more than £1m worth of assets, have been in place for the last two years, while the London Regional Asset Recovery Team (RART) based at Scotland Yard identified illegal profits.
The site - not to be confused with the entirely seperate and legitimate business Aldermaston Recycling Ltd at Paices Hill - was ranked as the south east’s highest risk, and highest priority, illegal waste.
Given the huge size of the landfill, the EA also undertook a comprehensive assessment for potential contamination. The major undertaking in 2009 showed that the landfill compromised more than 65,000 tons of contaminated but ‘non-hazardous’ construction waste.
At this week’s confiscation hearing, Judge Edmunds said: “Mr O’Donnell candidly said monies were paid into an account used by him to conceal ownership of assets and to transfer money to keep it safe from investigators; indeed there were a number of accounts in different names, all in an effort to conceal assets.
“He conducted businesses in ways designed to deceive, vehicles were registered to one of the companies created by Mr O’Donnell to assist fraud.”
EA spokeswoman Angus Innes said afterwards: “This investigation has been one of the biggest and most complex ever undertaken by the agency, working with the RART, using intelligence and forensic science to proactively target an organised criminal gang running an illegal waste site.
“Waste crime puts the environment and human health at risk and undermines legitimate waste businesses. The agency wants to make sure that serious waste crime doesn’t pay - we don’t just catch criminals, we want to confiscate the assets they’ve gained from crime.”
Aldermaston parish council chairman Dave Shirt said that the site was still a mess and added: “We’re waiting to see what the remediation plans are.”