Wisbech café owner could lose his alcohol licence after admitting to buying vodka from a ‘street seller’
A café owner will find out tomorrow whether he will lose his licence after he admitted to police to buying a bottle of vodka – contrary to his licensing conditions.
Fenland District Council’s licensing sub-committee is due to meet to discuss the breach that happened on May 10 at the Delicious Snack Bar in Hill Street, Wisbech.
The premises licence is subject to a number of conditions including: “No alcoholic drinks will be purchased by the store owners or staff from sellers calling at the store.”
The review of the licence for the café which is run by Constantino Almeida is being carried out following a request by police.
Cambridgeshire Police allege that Mr Almeida bought the bottle of vodka worth £22.99 for £10 from someone who had apparently bought it using a stolen credit card. The card had been taken from another premises in the town.
Part of the evidence councillors will hear is from body cam footage captured by PC Josh Yeomans when he visited the premises on May 11.
In it, and while under caution, Mr Almeida admits to buying the vodka – however, despite one of the other conditions of his licence being to have a fully-functioning CCTV system in the café, there was no footage of the purchase as it was discovered Mr Almeida did not know how it worked.
A report due to go to the committee said: “Mr Almeida was asked to demonstrate to the officers the CCTV footage for May 10 2024 - he advised he was unable to operate the system and called a friend, who attended, and it was established that the footage could not be played back and that nothing appeared to be stored on the hard drive.”
The system was seized by the police and a forensic examination established the hard drive was completely blank and contained no retrievable data.
This, said the report, is a clear breach of the licence conditions.
Police allege other conditions were also being breached including lack of training of staff, maintenance of records of incidents, and of refusals to sell alcohol.
The police report said: “Due to the breaches identified PC Paul Hawkins issued a notice via email on June 4 informing Mr Almeida that the premises was to stop selling alcohol immediately until all conditions were met.”
It goes on: “Whilst the order was in place, PC Hawkins received information from a third party on June 12 that Mr Almeida was continuing to serve alcohol on the premises, decanting products into disposable coffee cups.”
However, this was denied by Mr Almeida when confronted by Andy Fox, Fenland’s licencing officer, and there was no proof of any offences.
On June 20 following another inspection the ban on alcohol sales was lifted as a new CCTV system was installed, and fully operational and all the other breaches had been resolved.
However, the police want Fenland to consider suspending the premises licence and changing the Designated Premises Superviser (both of which are in Mr Almeida’s name), to ensure future compliance.
The move is in light of the handling of stolen goods which police said: “Those that receive stolen goods encourage criminal activity to continue. Delicious Snack Bar even has a condition on the licence to discourage the potential handling of stolen goods, which the licence holder admits to ignoring.”
The police conclude: “Positive action by the committee will also discourage other operators from committing similar offences”.
