‘Half of NI hauliers’ could be fuelling illegal diesel ‘epidemic’

By Categories: NewsPublished On: Friday 10 May 2013

fuelling2More than half of hauliers in Northern Ireland could be using cheaper, illegal diesel to fill their tanks, the Northern Ireland Assembly has been told — giving them an illegitimate advantage over law-abiding competitors.

The environment minister Alex Attwood MLA told his colleagues at Stormont that it was the view of “legitimate businesses” with whom he had met that “up to and maybe in excess of 50 per cent of hauliers are now using illegal fuel.”

Small firms were being affected most severely by diesel laundering, the minister added, which evidence suggested seemed largely to be taking place in the south Armagh area close to the border with the Republic of Ireland.

“There is going to be a need to escalate all our enforcement actions, be it through the Driver and Vehicle Agency (DVA), the Organised Crime Task Force, the various policing and criminal asset agencies North and South or the respective tax authorities,” he continued.

The illegal diesel trade is evidenced by the abandonment at roadsides of fuel sludge, which is produced during the laundering of duty-free agricultural diesel in order to remove giveaway marker dyes.

Said Attwood: “I have a map in my department on which we have identified those parts of the North, particularly in south Armagh, where fuel sludge has been abandoned on multiple occasions — in essentially the same place — to be collected by the relevant authorities.

“There is a road in Northern Ireland where sludge has been dumped following fuel laundering on 10 separate occasions at around the same location.”

To tackle the issue, Attwood said a cohesive approach between the governments in Belfast and Dublin would be required. He also promised to write to VOSA, the DVA’s equivalent in England, Wales and Scotland, to ask whether its enforcement operations at Holyhead were as rigorous as those for vehicles travelling into Scotland from Northern Ireland.

“I will write to the relevant authorities to ensure that compliance enforcement is robust at all points of entry and is targeted against hauliers who we suspect are not complying, be that around tachographs, the quality of their vehicle or the illegal fuel that they might be using,” Attwood said.

Meanwhile, regional development minister Danny Kennedy warned that the money generated from the illegal diesel trade would ultimately find its way into the pockets of republican paramilitaries.

Kennedy, who is also Ulster Unionist MLA for Newry and Armagh and has previously called the problem an “epidemic”, said that that moniker no longer did “proper justice to the scale of things”. Law-abiding citizens in isolated border areas were “living in fear” as a result of the illegal fuel operation, he claimed.

“It was put to me frankly and starkly… that people are dumping diesel where once they dumped bodies. 

“That has very sinister implications for what is called a shared future and community relations.  The law of the land has to extend to all areas, including to those areas of south Armagh, or wherever those actions are taken.”

There was also good news on road transport enforcement, however, Minister Attwood told MLAs; the Transport Regulation Unit in Northern Ireland, which fulfils a role similar to that of the Traffic Commissioners in Great Britain following major local reforms last year, was helping to drive up standards in the province in a range of compliance areas.

“In January this year, a new enforcement regime was introduced, arising from which there have been 19 so-called public inquiries into the conduct of hauliers,” he said. “Two of those hauliers are now on the verge of having their haulage licence not just suspended but withdrawn.”