World: British drug kingpin jailed over £20m international narcotics ring
Eddie Burton and Sian Banks convicted in a cross-border operation that authorities say would have flooded the UK with drugs.
An international drug trafficking operation centered on Britain ended with the jailing of Eddie Burton, 23, of Liverpool, for 19 years at Canterbury Crown Court on Friday after he pleaded guilty to four counts of importing Class A and B drugs as part of a £20 million operation. He ran the scheme with his former partner Sian Banks, 25, also from Liverpool, who was jailed for five years in February after pleading guilty to seven charges, including importing Class A drugs and money laundering.
The National Crime Agency said the operation was detected after two lorries bound for the UK were intercepted at Dover Port in 2022. The drugs weighed a total of about 307 kilograms and would have had a street value of roughly £20 million. The first lorry, stopped on July 3, contained 90 kilograms of ketamine and 50 kilograms of cocaine packed into boxes and a Lidl shopping bag. The second lorry, intercepted on August 12, contained 142 kilograms of cocaine and 25 kilograms of heroin concealed inside a modified fuel tank. The driver in that seizure, a 64-year-old Latvian national, Maris Fridvalds, was later sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment in March 2023.
Forensic examination linked Burton to the shipments: his fingerprints and DNA were found on both drug consignments and on the altered fuel tank. Prosecutors said Burton had been living between the Netherlands and Spain after leaving the United Kingdom in early 2021 and was arrested by Spanish police in August 2023 at the Pacha nightclub in Ibiza on unrelated drug dealing offences. He was extradited to Germany and charged with drug offences before being returned to the United Kingdom in March 2024 by National Extradition Unit officers from the NCA’s Joint International Crime Centre.
Banks, who had been dating Burton, was arrested in December 2023. Investigators found that between June 2022 and October 2023 she travelled monthly to the Netherlands and Spain to visit Burton; messages recovered after her phone was seized showed she helped prepare shipments and even claimed that her fingerprints were on the bags of ketamine, though Burton told her this did not matter. Banks was also found to have run a scam selling doctored Covid-19 travel documents during the pandemic. The couple are thought to have split after Burton’s arrest.
NCA Senior Investigating Officer John Turner said Burton, with Banks’ help, attempted to smuggle huge quantities of harmful drugs into the UK, believing he could operate with impunity overseas. "The drugs, if they had reached their final destination, would have had a destructive impact on communities and would have exploited vulnerable people along the supply chain," Turner added.
The case highlights the cross-border nature of modern drug trafficking networks and the way criminal enterprises can be anchored in foreign territories while targeting markets in the UK.