Mehdi Benbouzid, the public prosecutor of Saint-Omer commune, said the man was charged with manslaughter, unintentional injury, deliberate endangerment and aiding illegal entry and residence.

The boat capsized off the nearby commune of Gravelines and led to the death of one migrant. Meanwhile, the regional maritime authority said that two passengers were missing.

The boat was carrying 60 migrants, including children.

From the beginning of 2023 until late November, more than 28,000 people crossed the Channel, according to British government statistics.

The suspect who is reportedly from “Syrian Kurdistan” has denied the charges. Moreover, French authorities are pursuing another man suspected of also piloting the boat.

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Servier Laboratories was also fined €2.7 million but cleared of its charges for fraud in a case that grew into France’s biggest modern health scandals.

The 6,500 plaintiffs had accused the company of putting profits ahead of patients’ lives by allowing its diabetes drug, Mediator, to be widely and irresponsibly prescribed as a diet pill.

The drug is suspected of causing up to 2,000 deaths among millions who took it as an appetite suppressant over three decades, according to a 2010 study. Doctors also linked it to heart and lung problems.

The company was tried for charges including manslaughter, involuntary injury, fraud, and influence trading. Investigating magistrates concluded that Servier covered up the drug’s effects on patients.

Sylvie Daunis, who presided over the ruling at a Paris court, said the company has “undermined confidence in the health system.”

“Despite the knowledge they had of the risks incurred for many years, (…) they never took the necessary measures and thus deceived” consumers of Mediator, she added.

Prosecutors had asked for the company to be fined nearly €15 million and for the only Servier executive accused of involvement still alive today, Dr. Jean-Philippe Seta, to be sentenced to three years in jail and to pay a fine of €278,000.

Seta was sentenced to a four-year suspended prison term.

France’s national medicines agency was also slapped with a €303,000 fine for colluding to mask the drug’s danger.

Plaintiffs have also asked for damages totalling €1 billion.

Servier has asked for an acquittal, arguing that it wasn’t aware of the risks associated with Mediator before 2009 and that it never pretended it was a diet pill.

One doctor flagged concerns as far back as 1998 and testified that he was bullied into retracting them. Facing questions about the drug’s side effects from medical authorities in Switzerland, Spain and Italy, Servier withdrew it from those markets between 1997 and 2004.

It took an independent investigation by another worried French doctor before the company suspended sales in its main market in France in 2009.

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Two drivers were also found guilty at the Old Bailey of conspiring to transport Vietnamese migrants from northern France to Britain. The verdicts came at the end of a trial which exposed for the first time a complex and lucrative operation which has for years illegally brought Vietnamese people into the UK.

Eamonn Harrison, 23, a lorry driver from Northern Ireland, and Gheorghe Nica, 43, the coordinator of the operation, from Romania, were found guilty of manslaughter. Another Northern Irish lorry driver, Christopher Kennedy, 24, and Valentin Calota, 38, a pickup driver from Romania, were both convicted of conspiring to smuggle people into the country unlawfully.

Police said the two ringleaders, Nica and Ronan Hughes, 41, who pleaded guilty before the trial began, were motivated by “pure and utter greed” when they decided to ignore obvious risks and packed the container with double the normal number of people to increase their profit on an operation that netted them hundreds of thousands of pounds for every “consignment” of migrants. Each passenger paid smugglers between £10,000 and £13,000 to be brought from northern France to the UK.

The court heard how young lorry drivers from a rural area of Northern Ireland were recruited to work for Hughes, an Irish haulier, who alternated between legitimate shipments of waffles, soft drinks and wine from warehouses across Europe and illegal smuggling of alcohol, cigarettes and people. He often undercut other haulage firms to secure legitimate work so he was able to appear to be running a reputable business.

The drivers claimed in court that although they were knowingly involved in smuggling illegal items, they had no idea there were people in the containers, but the jury was unconvinced.

The trial focused on four unlawful consignments of migrants brought to the UK in October 2019, the last of which ended in the deaths of the 39 people. Kennedy and Calota were not involved that night, but participated in earlier transportations along the same route.

Maurice Robinson, 26, a lorry driver who collected the trailer with the 39 migrants, who were already dead, from Purfleet docks in Essex on 22 October, also pleaded guilty to manslaughter before the trial began.

CCTV screengrab of Maurice Robinson leaving Purfleet port in Essex. 
Photograph: Essex Police/PA

The victims were 28 men, eight women and three children, two of them aged 15. When it became obvious there was insufficient oxygen they made desperate attempts to escape, and tried to call emergency services in Vietnam. As they began to die inside the dark container, where the temperature had risen to 38.5C, they recorded farewell messages for their relatives. They died of asphyxia and hyperthermia, or overheating.

All three drivers on trial offered the same defence: that they knew they were involved in criminal smuggling activity – and were using burner phones to communicate their plans – but they had no idea they were helping to smuggle people.

Harrison said he thought he was helping to smuggle stolen lorry parts; Kennedy said he believed he was involved in transporting untaxed cigarettes. Although Nica admitted involvement in people-smuggling on earlier occasions, he claimed he was unaware that people were involved on the night of 22 October.

The prosecution barrister, Bill Emlyn Jones, questioned whether it was plausible that the drivers could not have noticed people getting in and out of the back of their vehicles. He asked if they could have been “blissfully unaware of the smuggling of migrants as it took place literally under their noses”.

He said it would have been a “ridiculous and avoidable risk” for the ringleaders to recruit drivers who did not know what they were smuggling. “Just a look in the wing mirror would have been enough to give the game away.”

The court heard that most of the Vietnamese people who wanted to travel to the UK were given instructions via Facebook Messenger and the messaging app Viber to meet at a flat in Paris. They were then taken on a five-hour taxi ride to Bierne, a village near Dunkirk, where they hid in a barn until Harrison arrived to collect them.

Harrison said he was told to take a walk, or have a nap in his cab while the loading happened. He said he was watching Netflix while the 39 were locked inside the container.

The prosecution argued that this was unlikely, and called “witness X” – a Vietnamese passenger who was smuggled to London on 10 October 2019 in a truck owned by Hughes – to give evidence. He told the court that the lorry driver had loaded him and the other migrants into the trailer.

When the container arrived in the UK, another of Hughes’s drivers would collect it from the docks at Purfleet to take it to a container park in the grounds of nearby Collingwood Farm. Each time, Hughes and Nica arranged for a number of vehicles to be waiting to take the migrants to a flat in Dulwich, south London, believed to belong to a man called Fong, who was the key Vietnamese contact.

People would be locked inside the flat until relatives made the final £10,000 payment for successful delivery to the UK, at which point they were free to leave. Fong, who has not been traced, is believed to have shared the payments with Hughes and Nica.

Police said the lorry drivers who collected the migrants from northern France and delivered them to Zeebrugge, or collected them from Purfleet and took them to the waiting vehicles, were paid about £1,500 per passenger – making £30,000 for the average-sized consignment of 20 migrants.

Sometimes the migrants were loaded on top of other shipments. Kennedy spent a few hours with his boss, Hughes, trying to make a consignment of Mrs Crimble’s macaroons and bakewell tarts look presentable enough to be delivered to the wholesaler, after a group of about 20 migrants had travelled for nine hours sitting on them. The wholesaler rejected the biscuits because they were crushed and covered with footprints.

The court heard that double the usual number of migrants had been packed into the final October shipment because just a few days earlier, on 14 October, Harrison had collected 20 Vietnamese people from northern France but was stopped at the Eurotunnel entrance and all 20 were removed. Harrison was not fined, and was allowed to continue to the UK with an empty trailer. Anxious to secure the money, paid on arrival, Hughes decided to increase the number in the shipment on 22 October.

An expert witness told the court that even with just 15 or 20 passengers the amount of oxygen in the trailer would begin dwindling after about nine hours. Hughes was clearly conscious of the risks involved in doubling the number of migrants and messaged Robinson to tell him to stop and give them some air as soon as he left the port in Essex. When Robinson opened the container doors it was too late: they were all dead.

Image of phone message from Hughes to Robinson about the people in the 
back of his lorry. Photograph: Essex Police/PA

“They were treated worse than cattle,” DCI Daniel Stoten, who led the Essex police investigation, said. “They treated them as just another commodity. It could have been drugged, it could have been alcohol. Each person had a price. It was inhumane.”

Police said Robinson, who claimed he was paid £600 a week as a lorry driver, had unexplained payments totaling £100,000 going into his bank account the year before his arrest, and drove an expensive Mercedes. Had all the smuggling runs Hughes organized in October been successful, the conspirators would have earned more than £1m.

This was the biggest investigation ever conducted by Essex police, and involved more than 1,300 people. Officers analysed 1,586 witness statements and conducted 55 interviews. As a result of the deaths, a new design of refrigerated trailer has been made which includes a safety air valve that can be opened from the inside. And lorry drivers found with people in their trailers will no longer be let off with a fine but face immediate arrest.

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