A City stockbroker was jailed for 18 months today

A City stockbroker was jailed for 18 months today Wednesday
for possessing a Heckler and Koch machine gun and ammunition.

Gun enthusiast Richard Chambers, 26 – whose ex-wife is a
City of London police officer – had been suspended from his pnds
stlg 26,000 a year job with Barclays De Zoete Wedd following his
arrest.

Acting on a tip-off armed officers swooped on his luxury home
in Vanbrugh Park Road, Blackheath, on May 5 this year.

In his garage they found ‘deadly weapon’ with 160 rounds of
ammunition in a garage.

Jailing the immaculately dressed broker, Judge Jeremy Fordham
told him: ‘This weapon and the ammunition for it, does not need
me to describe the obvious gravity it presents to the public
in having such things about.

‘I deal with you on the basis not that you were going to use
it, but were looking after it for another person in circumstances
which made it absolutely obvious it was not legitimate.

‘The courts have to make it absolutely clear that anybody who
commits such offences is going to get a substantial sentence.

‘
Mr Brian Stork, prosecuting, told Inner London Crown Court
that Chambers – who pleaded guilty to unlawful possession
of a prohibited weapon – had claimed he had been pressurised into
looking after the gun by someone else.

He had given that person’s first name and a location but
police had come up with nothing.

Chambers had been a member of a gun club for many years
and had regulalrly competed in European championship events.

The court was told that in March last year he had been fined
pnds stlg 1,250 after admitting illegal possession of a pump
action shotgun and ammunition.

He had been arrested for that offence after his common law
wife, a City of London police officer, had informed on him
when their relationship ended.

The magistrates on that occasion had accepted that it was
a technical offence of unlawful possession after the weapon had
become prohibited under new legislation and he should have
surrendered it, but had not.

Chambers, now remarried, swayed in the dock as he received
his jail term and his new wife broke down in tears.

ENDS
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