No jail for tacho cheat who lied about his location
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A NORTH WALES truck driver has escaped a jail sentence despite committing tacho offences at the rate of almost one a week. Instead Alan Morris of Brymbo, near Wrexham, has been ordered to do 180 hours' community serv ice with £750 costs. Morris admitted 19 charges of falsifying tachograph records and asked for a further 32 similar offences to be taken into consider ation atWrexham Crown Court. Mark Laprell, prosecuting, said Morris put down false locations for the start and end of journeys, and more than 1,100km of distance was missing from his
tachograph charts. His motivation was not clear: the prosecution alleged that it had been to claim expenses for overnight stops in Wolverhampton
when in fact he was back at home in the Wrexham area. Both Morris and his employer denied this. But the judge said that there was no other explanation and described as "nonsense" a suggestion that he had not been dishon
est when he put Wolverhampton down as the end of a journey when he was in fact back home. Judge Merfyn Hughes QC told Morris: "If you had been going
over your hours, whatever the motivation, you would be going to prison today. "I look at this matter as an offence in some way against the Revenue — on the basis that you obtained money from your
employers, possibly with their knowledge, in respect of which you would otherwise have to pay tax upon it."