Mark Shum: guilty of supplying cannabis
A grandfather who was caught transporting a haul of herbal cannabis with a street value of £150,000 was jailed for three years.
Police recovered a consignment of the drug weighing almost 45 kilos packed into two suitcases after they pulled Mark Shum over as he was driving on the A90 Dundee to Aberdeen road, in August last year.
A judge told the 63-year-old at the High Court in Edinburgh: "The jury has convicted you of a serious offence involving a substantial quantity of cannabis and you were concerned in the supply of that drug."
Lord Malcolm said: "It is clear this was a commercial operation and that you sought financial gain from an illegal activity causes misery and worse to the ultimate end users."
The judge told first-offender Shum the court had to take "a serious view" of the crime. A co-accused He Leng had faced the same charge but his not guilty plea was accepted by the Crown.
Shum had denied the offence and said he was paid £100 to collect Leng from Edinburgh and drive him to Aberdeen for a job. He claimed that the suitcases belonged to Leng and thought they were full of clothes.
Shum, who first came to Britain in 1973 from Hong Kong, claimed he knew nothing about the drugs, but was found guilty of the offence by a jury.
Defence counsel David Moggach said that one of Shum's two sons had a drug problem and as a result Shum and his wife cared for a two-year-old grandson.
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