Jail for Mars Bar thief
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• The Tibbett & Britten warehouse manager who programmed robots to help him to steal 300 tonnes of Mars Bars has been jailed for five years after being found guilty of their theft.
Martin Keys, of Vale Cottages, Wyck Hill, Stow on the Wold, Gloucestershire— who had "lived the life of Riley" with the money he made from the stolen chocolate—was sentenced last week following the two-week trial at Gloucester Crown Court.
The jury found him guilty of conspiring to steal confec• tionery from the Tibbett & Britten warehouse in Bicester, Oxon, with two charges of theft and one of attempted theft.
But his former girlfriend, magistrate's daughter Emma Smiley, 25, was cleared of "laundering" some of the money Keys made from the thefts.
During the trial the jury heard that Keys, who was a shift supervisor at the Tibbett & Britten warehouse, abused his trusted position to create bogus orders for chocolate on the computer system.
Lorries hired in Birmingham by a fellow conspirator, Amardeep Singh Minhas, were sent to the warehouse to collect the loads—worth almost 170,000 each time.
Eight loads were successfully compiled and driven away to a warehouse in Birmingham where the chocolate was sold cheaply to local shopkeepers, it was alleged.
But the plot was revealed when Keys tried to create a ninth false load and there was not enough chocolate in the warehouse to fulfil it.
Enquiries began and the finger of suspicion soon pointed at Keys because of the lavish lifestyle he had been living.