Albanians Jailed For Sex Trafficking

Two Albanian men living in the UK who trafficked women for prostitution were today jailed and recommended for deportation. Cardiff Crown Court heard that Erjon Javori, 32, of Adelphi Street, Sheffield and Arjan Kanani, 22, of Queenwood, Cardiff, were involved in prostituting four Lithuanian women at brothels in Birmingham and Cardiff.

The court heard the women would, out of fear, hand over their earnings of around £400 each a day to the men.

Robert Brown, prosecuting, told the court that the scheme involved picking up women from Gatwick Airport when they arrived in the country and taking them to Birmingham, where they were put in hotels with other prostitutes and immediately put to work in the city’s brothels.

Javori pleaded guilty to trafficking within the UK for sexual exploitation, causing or inciting prostitution for gain, and two counts of controlling prostitution for gain. He was sentenced to a total of seven years in prison.

Kanani pleaded guilty to two counts of controlling prostitution for gain, trafficking within the UK for sexual exploitation, and trafficking into the UK for sexual exploitation. He received a total jail term of five and a half years.

Mr Brown said the women, all in their early 20s with no prospect of work, were recruited locally by a scheme operating in Lithuania.

At least one of the women had believed she was coming to work in a restaurant or hotel in the UK, he said.

When she arrived, Javori drove her to Birmingham where he took her to the Bullring shopping centre and “equipped her for prostitution”, the court heard.

Mr Brown said she was then sent to work in a brothel where she had sex with 10 men on the first day before managing to escape.

Javori also lived off the earnings of a second woman he prostituted, Mr Brown said, and that they also had a consensual sexual relationship.

This woman, he said, later told police she was earning her pimp £1,200 a week through prostitution. She was rescued when police raided the brothel where she was working.

A third woman was brought into the UK by Chinese people, Mr Brown said, and was already working as a prostitute when she was acquired by the defendants.

She was at first pimped by Javori before he handed her over to Kanani, he said.

“She said that she and the other girls were making £300 to £400 a day which meant Kanani was earning as much as £2,000 to £4,000 a day due to the scale of the operation,” Mr Brown said.

He said this woman went on to help recruit the fourth woman named in the charges.

This fourth woman, Mr Brown said, knew she was coming to the UK to be a prostitute but had not been a prostitute in her home country.

She was put under “dreadful pressure” to come to the UK, even by some members of her own family, he said.

Mr Brown conceded that Kanani may not have been aware of the pressure she had been under.

He said the defendants fell out around December 2005, which resulted in them dividing the women between them and Kanani moving to Cardiff where he continued to prostitute them.

Mr Brown said Javori was an illegal immigrant who had been in the UK since 1999. He had three different names and three different passports.

Kanani had been granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK, he added.

The court heard they had both made a substantial profit from the prostitution trade. Javori had over £94,000 of unexplained deposits in his bank accounts and Kanani had more than £110,000 in his accounts from prostitution.

Malcolm Bishop, defending Javori, said his dealings with the first woman had lasted less than a day and that others were more responsible for what happened to her.

He said the second woman was already working as a prostitute before Javori met her and there was an immediate attraction between them.

They began a consensual sexual relationship the day they met, he added.

Mr Bishop said the third woman had told police that Javori had never been violent towards her and that she had never witnessed any violence from him towards anyone else.

“He believed that each of the three women were already working prostitutes. There is no evidence that he knew the scale of the operation that led to (the first woman) being brought here,” he said.

“This is a case where there was no coercion of the women in question, who were free to return home.”

David Aubrey QC, defending Kanani, said his client accepted an element of control over the women but claimed there had been no overt coercion.

“Kanani did not have anything that could be described as a leading part,” he said.

There was even CCTV footage, he said, which showed one of the women showing him affection.

Mr Aubrey said there were no doubt very powerful reasons Kanani had been granted leave to remain in the UK.

“We are told in part this was because there was not a living member of his family in his home country, they were all killed. He himself is in danger if he is deported there.”