Calais hotel manager sentenced for renting out rooms to UK-bound migrants
A HOTEL manager in the northern French port town of Calais has been handed a one-year suspended prison sentence for renting out rooms to illegal immigrants en route to Britain.
The hotel manager was renting rooms to migrants hoping to cross into the UK
The Boulogne-sur-Mer court found the man, whose name has not been revealed to the press, guilty of “facilitating unlawful immigration to France,” the local prosecutor, Pascal Marconville, said.
The hotel manager has also been banned from working in the hotel industry for five years.
Three other Calais hotel managers with close links to the hotelier who were also facing migrant smuggling charges were discharged by the court.
Mr Marconville had initially called for the hotelier and his suspected accomplices to be jailed for between 18 to 30 months.
The four men were arrested after police – who had put the suspects under surveillance – raided their hotels, the Bel Azur, the Citadel, the Tudor and the Pacifion, on February 7.
An undisclosed number of illegal immigrants from Albania and Iraq – who had been hiding out in their tiny rooms – were also arrested. Police also found mobile phones, chargers, 35 suitcases and three bin bags filled with clothes during the hotel raids.
The unnamed man has been sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence
Dover residents fear Calais' border controls could move to the UK
Calais is the official gateway from France to the UK
Some 23,000 euros (£19,700) in cash – including 14,000 euros (£12,000) stashed under a kitchen sink – was found during a raid on the hotelier’s home.
The hotel manager told the court that the cash found during the raid was money he had saved up to “pay for his cancer-stricken mother’s medical bills”.
But whilst the hotelier told the court that he had simply been “doing his job,” Mr Marconville argued that he had “taken advantage” of the migrant crisis in Calais to make money.
Calais, a port town on the Franco-British border, is the official gateway into Britain.