Lucerne hire car seized in shipping container in England
Keystone-SDA
A 39-year-old man has been found guilty of embezzlement by the criminal court because he wanted to ship a car rented in Lucerne from the UK to Ghana. He received a conditional prison sentence of 11 months.
The judgement published on Saturday is legally binding. There is no trace of the accused. The trial was held in absentia in April, according to the judgement published on Saturday.
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According to the indictment, the accused rented a BMW X6 for a week in Lucerne in 2017. Trips abroad were not contractually authorised. However, the accused did not return the car and broke off contact with the car hire firm.
The vehicle was found in a container in Tilbury harbour in the UK without number plates. It was to be shipped to Ghana.
The accused, who was remanded in custody for 51 days in 2023, said in the preliminary proceedings that he had nothing to do with the disappearance of the car. Rather, it had disappeared overnight from the car park in London.
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However, the judge did not believe the accused’s version of events because he never reported the loss of the vehicle to the police. The man was also from Ghana and it was probably no coincidence that the hire car was ready to be shipped to his home country, according to the judgement.
The criminal court categorised the man’s culpability as minor because had not acted in a particularly sophisticated manner. Because the proceedings took a long time, the court reduced the 12 month sentence requested by the public prosecutor’s office to 11 months. The probationary period is two years.
Adapted from German by DeepL/ac
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