Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh writes minute to decider for drug-smuggling cousin

By Richard Edwards, Crime Correspondent 440PM GMT twenty-three March 2010

Money... but does it have you happy? Photo PA

Siobhain McDonagh wrote a minute for Peter Moran, her second cousin, that was upheld to a decider yesterday by his lawyers prior to he is condemned for importing roughly �70 million value of "skunk" cannabis in to Britain.

It offered, in mitigation, sum of the "terribly tragic" family resources he had suffered in new years.

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The Labour MP for Mitcham and Morden pronounced that she wrote the anxiety but asking what he was indicted of, and pronounced it had been a "great shock" to her family when the astringency of his crimes emerged in court.

In dual years Moran, 37, and dual alternative drug bosses organized at slightest 88 shipments of skunk dark in boxes of flowering plants from Holland - bringing in sufficient of the drug for 225,000 travel deals per week - creation them the greatest cannabis importers in Britain.

The squad leaders were so impressed with their increase they could not refine the income fast sufficient and large bundles of money were left in skips to go mouldy.

They are all confronting prison carrying been pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court, to swindling to import tranquil drug and swindling to refine the deduction of crime.

It has given emerged that Miss McDonagh was the second cousin of Moran and used to be his babysitter.

The MP told The Daily"I did not know what he was charged with. I was approached by members of my family to insist the comfortless resources around Peters family and that is what I have done.

"Peters silent and father died in intolerable resources inside of 6 months of each alternative twelve years ago. After that Peter cared for his sister who has suffered from mental health problems. That is all my minute said."

Miss McDonagh one after another "I have not seen Peter for 3 years. I knew him comparatively well when he was a small child and I used to babysit occasionally.

"I can assure you I was utterly unknowingly of the impasse with the squad and hold that he never had a rapist record.

"I have got an endless Irish family, we are really Catholic, and it is a good shock to the family."

Moran, who lived in Fulham, west London, invested his gain from drug bootlegging in construction a formidable of oppulance villas in the Spanish legal holiday island of Lanzarote.

His attorney Peter Griffiths, QC, upheld the MPs minute to Judge Gregory Stone, QC. It was not review to the court.

Moran will be condemned with associate ringleaders Mark Kinnimont, 40, and Terrence Bowler, 40, and 9 lower-level squad members on Thursday at Southwark Crown Court.