A MAN caught red-handed unloading smuggled cigarettes worth almost £1.8million in duty and taxes has been jailed for three years.

Customs officers arrested Shaun Burniston, 53, from Gateshead, as he was unloading 8.3 million cigarettes from a lorry into a secluded barn in Peterborough in August 2013.

He was removing 26 pallets of non-UK duty paid cigarettes, which had been smuggled from Holland.

Burniston thought he had avoided detection as the cigarettes were smuggled into the country with paperwork claiming it to be electrical equipment in the back of the lorry.

Brett Wilkinson, assistant director of the Fraud Investigation Service at HMRC, said: “Using a remote location and concealing the cigarettes within a cover load of electrical equipment, Burniston wrongly assumed that he and the illegal goods were well hidden but there is no hiding place.

“HMRC will make use of every tool available to tackle fraud and ensure that we catch organised criminals, and make sure that no one is beyond our reach.

"This criminal activity harms the livelihoods of honest shopkeepers, disrupting criminal trade is at the heart of our strategy to clampdown on the illicit tobacco market, which costs the UK economy £2.4 billion a year.”

Burniston admitted the fraudulent evasion of excise duty at an earlier hearing and was sentenced to three years in prison at Ipswich Crown Court on Friday.