A CANNABIS gardener caught with a roll of new £20 banknotes, a coffee table with tobacco on it and a key to the property has been jailed for two years and four months.

Judge Jonathan Rose today rejected any suggestion that Binh Nguyen had been exploited when he agreed to take up the £1,000 a month employment at the house, demanding an up-front payment first.

Nguyen, 31, of no fixed address, was the only one home when police attended at the address in Holmfield, Halifax, shortly after midday on March 26.

Bradford Crown Court heard that officers were acting on suspicions that cannabis was being grown at the address.

They were outside listening to the whirring of fans from within when Nguyen appeared in the porch.

He panicked, froze and locked the door before inviting the police in, prosecutor Jade Ed-wards said.

The front room was partitioned by a plastic sheet from floor the ceiling and one section had a mattress, bedding, clothing and a coffee table with tobacco and other personal items on it.

Through a gap in the sheeting, the officers could see bright yellow lighting. Behind the screen were cannabis plants rooted in soil that were in the process of being re-potted, Miss Edwards said.

Nguyen was arrested and the rest of the house searched.

In the three bedrooms were a total of 142 cannabis plants of various sizes. Fifty of them were in a propagator and there were 30 roots in pots indicating an earlier harvest.

Stripped cannabis stems were found and the electricity meter had been bypassed.

Nguyen told the police he had come to the United Kingdom six years ago after paying the “Vietnamese Mafia” for his passage here.

He had been working unlawfully in kitchens to pay off the £30,000 debt but when the coronavirus pandemic ended that employment he felt he had no choice but to work at the cannabis farm.

He said he was being paid £1,000 a month and had demanded a down payment for starting the work.

Nguyen had no previous convictions, the court was told.

He pleaded guilty at the magistrates’ court to being concerned in the production of cannabis and possession of the banknotes as criminal property.

His barrister, Imran Majid, said his was a lesser and not a significant role in the enterprise.

There were those much further up the chain than him.

But Judge Rose rejected any notion that Nguyen had been exploited.

“He was a cog in a criminal machine; a small but essential cog to make the machine work,” he said.

He told Nguyen he would be returned to Vietnam after serving his sentence.

“You may wish to tell your fellow countrymen that if they come here to grow cannabis they will go to prison and then be sent back,” he added.