Customs find 29.4 kg of cannabis in chest at St Andrew's vinery unit
On 22 May 2025 Guernsey Customs cut open a locked trailer at Ridgeway Vinery and found 29.4 kg of cannabis and cannabis resin plus ketamine in a metal chest; DNA tied the stash to Matthew Lovell and Richard Le Cras, who were later jailed for wider drug supply.
🇬🇬 Ridgeway Vinery, Pointes Lane, St Andrew's, Guernsey
Guernsey Customs and the Economic and Financial Crime Bureau had watched a rented unit at
Ridgeway Vinery in Pointes Lane, St Andrew’s, during a long investigation into Matthew
Stewart Lovell, 49, and Richard Michael Le Cras, 47.[1][2]
On 22 May 2025 officers used an angle grinder to cut a lock on a trailer linked to Le Cras.[1]Inside a black metal chest they found 29.4 kg of cannabis and cannabis resin and 191.3 g of
ketamine.[1]DNA from the chest linked both men to the drugs.[1][2]Le Cras was arrested
that day; Lovell had already been arrested on 4 April after surveillance at the same vinery.[1][2]
The Royal Court later heard that the pair supplied MDMA, ketamine, cannabis and cannabis resin
from the site; Lovell was jailed for 20 years and six months and Le Cras for 13 years and seven
months in September 2026 after guilty pleas.[1][2]Island FM said investigators also traced
about £460,000 in criminal cash from Lovell’s banking.[2]
Photos and video
Ridgeway Vinery in St Andrew's, where the drugs were hiddenPhoto details
The chest also held 191.3 g of ketamine; this report counts only the 29.4 kg of cannabis and resin named in the same find.
Lovell had already been arrested on 4 April 2025 after MDMA was found at the unit; Le Cras was arrested on 22 May when the chest was opened.
Street-value estimates up to £1.54 million for the whole operation were cited at sentencing in September 2026, not specifically for the May cannabis haul.
Bengaluru city police seized 46 kg and 486 grams of ganja and 1 litre and 542 millilitres of hashish oil in raids across eleven police-station areas, an operation in which they arrested 34 people. Police valued all the narcotics seized, including MDMA and cocaine, at Rs 12.61 crore and registered cases under the NDPS Act.
Santa Catarina's BOPE special operations battalion seized about 420 kg of a substance resembling marijuana from an uninhabited house used as a drug depot in Guarda do Cubatão, Palhoça, in the early hours of 11 November 2026 after a neighbours' tip. Officers saw the tablets through a window; the load went to the Civil Police station and no arrests were announced.
Federal Highway Police arrested a 44-year-old truck driver in the early hours of 11 November 2026 after finding more than half a tonne of skunk, about 591 packages, in a false bottom of his truck's cargo body at km 319 of the BR-070 in Jussara, Goiás. The load had left Cacoal, Rondônia, bound for Goiânia, and the driver was to be paid R$10,000.
The Court of Appeal left Heather Guest's conviction for permitting cannabis-resin smoking at the Helmsman pub undisturbed, despite doubts about whether the conviction was safe. Convicted in 2002 and sentenced to six weeks in prison, she said she ejected suspected smokers. The judges considered their powers too limited to set aside the conviction on the basis of those doubts.
