A CUSTOMER of a cigarette-smuggling gang from Bolton has been jailed by a court.

HGV driver Carl Coxon was caught taking delivery of 40,000 black market cigarettes from the criminal outfit in April 2014.

The 56-year-old admitted evading £11,720 in excise duty and VAT and was given six months’ jail, suspended for 12 months, and an overnight curfew for three months.

Tony Capon, assistant director of the Fraud Investigation Service at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, said afterwards: “Coxon was caught buying illegal cigarettes from a gang in Bolton and now has a criminal record as a result.

“This gang smuggled millions of cigarettes into the UK, evading hundreds of thousands of pounds that should have been paying for public services.

“Instead they lined their own pockets with the criminal profits.”

The sentencing of Coxon, of Clough Road, Stalybridge, follows the sentencing in July last year of the seven Bolton gang members.

They concealed 3.2million illegal Pride cigarettes inside a freight consignment of metal pipes.

Many of the packets were still hidden inside the pipes when officials showed up and the remainder were in various stages of being loaded in vans or were inside vans in transit.