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| Ivars Mezals and Juris Valujevs guilty of illegal gangmaster charges | Ivars Mezals and Juris Valujevs guilty of illegal gangmaster charges |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Two men have been found guilty of acting as unlicensed gangmasters in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. | Two men have been found guilty of acting as unlicensed gangmasters in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. |
| Ivars Mezals, 28, from Wisbech and Juris Valujevs, 36, from King's Lynn, were found guilty after a trial at Blackfriars Crown Court in London. | |
| Mezals has been found not guilty of conspiracy to breach immigration laws. | |
| The Latvian pair were arrested after raids led by Cambridgeshire Police in October 2013. | The Latvian pair were arrested after raids led by Cambridgeshire Police in October 2013. |
| The court heard Mezals and Valujevs acted as illegal gangmasters between January 2009 and Oct 2013. | |
| They are expected to be sentenced on Friday. | |
| 'Back-breaking' work | |
| The jury was unable to reach verdicts against Valujevs, Valujevs' wife Oksana Valujeva, 33, and their friend Lauma Vankova, 26, all of whom were charged with conspiracy to help breach UK immigration law by arranging sham marriages. | |
| Mezals, from Conference Way in Wisbech, Valujevs and Mrs Valujeva from Cresswell Street in King's Lynn, and Ms Vankova, from Turbis Road in King's Lynn, were arrested in October last year in raids led by Cambridgeshire Police. | |
| During the nine-week trial, the court heard Mezals and Valujevs used fear and debt to control people brought to Britain from the Baltic States, who sometimes received less than £1 for a week of "back-breaking" work picking vegetables in Cambridgeshire. | |
| The migrant workers travelled to the UK voluntarily, but signed up for work when they were promised regular well-paid work, decent accommodation and the "hope of a better life", Gregory Perrins, prosecuting, told the court. | |
| Sham marriages | |
| Instead they were forced to live in cramped and dilapidated homes, paid fines for "fanciful" reasons including smoking, and were threatened if they complained, he said. | |
| The jury heard workers who fell into debt were told "if you don't pay, your life will be ended like Alisa's (Dmitrijeva)" - the Latvian teenager found murdered on the Queen's Sandringham Estate in Norfolk in 2012. | |
| One female worker was fined £100 a day when she was unable to work because her child was ill, the court heard. | |
| Mr Perrins said some other female workers who fell into debt were "offered the opportunity to clear their debts if they entered into sham marriages". | |
| All four defendants denied the charges relating to sham marriages. |