Aylesbury shop accused of selling vodka, vapes and tobacco to children could lose licence

A Buckinghamshire shop accused of selling vodka, vapes and tobacco to children could lose its licence.

An order to close the Stoke Convenience Store at 59 Stoke Road, Aylesbury for one month was granted by High Wycombe Magistrates Court on December 3, 2024.

The application to shut down the shop, which is also known as ‘The Sun’, was applied for by Trading Standards after it received 65 complaints about the store from 2022 onwards, most of which related to underage sales.

Shopkeeper Sivagnanam Pakeerathan ‘pleaded’ with Buckinghamshire Council’s licensing sub-committee on Thursday to let the shop keep its licence.

Speaking via a translator, he promised to ‘adhere to the conditions’ of the licence, while admitting the business had ‘made mistakes’.

He appeared before councillors alongside Mr Suthakaran Krishnapillai, the shop’s owner and holder of the premises licence granted by the council in 2021.

The committee heard how Trading Standards test purchasers had been sold illegal vapes and tobacco on several occasions.

A test purchaser bought two £5 packs of ‘smuggled and counterfeit’ Richmonds from the shop in February 2023.

The same month, Trading Standards said a 15-year-old boy bought a vape containing nicotine as part of a test purchase exercise with Thames Valley Police.

In October of that year, a private investigator employed by a tobacco company purchased several illegal products, including Top Gun cigarettes for £6 and a pouch of Amber Leaf tobacco for £7.

Illegal vapes containing nicotine – with tanks bigger than 2ml – have also been found at the premises on several occasions.

Some 1,515 illegal vapes were seized there in January last year, along with 148 packs of illegal cigarettes and a further 1,219 packs in a van outside.

Illegal cigarettes stashed in an oven in the back room of the shop were also discovered in a separate bust in 2022.

Trading Standards said one of the most recent illegal sales was in November last year, when a test purchaser was told to ‘go around to the back of the shop’ before being sold counterfeit Lambert and Butler cigarettes at £8.75 a pack – nearly half the market value of real ones.

Mr Pakeerathan told Thursday’s meeting that the shop was ‘deceived big time’ by the person who sold them the business as they realised once they moved in that the daily takings were ‘only around £300’.

He also told the committee: “I had a knee replacement on both of my knees in 2000 and cannot stand more than five minutes.

“My children are attending grammar school, and I found myself struggling to pay their tuition fees and bus fees and things like that. So, I was forced to take over this business to make ends meet. I am struggling a lot right now, so all I want is to have some sympathy.”

Mr Pakeerathan admitted his wife had sold a vape to an underage person, but said the shop had not sold alcohol to children.

Complaints about underage alcohol sales at the shop were brought to the committee’s attention by Thames Valley Police and Trading Standards.

These included a witness statement from a mother whose ‘paralytic’ 14-year daughter collapsed outside McDonald’s in Aylesbury in June last year after drinking vodka she allegedly bought at the convenience store.

She said: “By the time I got to McDonalds, there was an ambulance on the scene. I could see she was on the stretcher at the back of the ambulance, but she was unresponsive.

“When I saw her, I didn’t know what to think and I was feeling sick to the pit of my stomach. I was worried beyond belief, and I was in shock.”

During the meeting, Cllr Phil Gomm said the shop had ignored warnings and ‘carried on with illegal activity’.

He said: “You asked us to treat you kindly maybe not to revoke the licence. But you are asking us to trust you to not do what you have been doing.”