Gent appeal is rejected
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• St Helens haulier Kenneth Gent has been ordered to pay costs of £849.46, after his appeal against his conviction on nine overloading off ences was rejected at Mold Crown Court. Gent had been fined a total of 2900 by Denbigh magistrates in May.
For the prosecution, Trevor Halbert said that Gent was one of a number of hauliers transporting 65,000 tonnes of boulders required for sea defence works at Penrhyn Bay. After loading at a quarry, the vehicles travelled via a public weighbridge at Ruthin. A senior trading standards officer visited the weighbridge and when he examined the weight tickets he found 86 occasions when vehicles had been grossly overloaded. Twelve of those occasions involved Gent, and he had been prosecuted for nine offences when the excess weight varied between 5.3 and 18.9%.
A double weighing procedure had been adopted, as the weighbridge capacity was 30 tonnes. Subsequent checks showed the maximum error to be substantially less than 1%.
For Gent, transport consultant, Colin Ward argued that double weighing was notoriously inaccurate if done incorrectly, and he did not believe the weighbridge operator was qualified to carry it out.
Dismissing the appeal, Judge Elgan Edwards said it was necessary for the prosecution to prove a substantial overload in the region of that alleged, rather than the precise weight. He was quite satisfied there had been substantial overloads in the region of the alleged percentages.