Town player gets one-year driving ban
By Katie McGonagle (Green'Un24)SUPER Blues star Carlos Edwards has been fined £7,650 and banned from the road for a year after admitting a series of driving offences.
The Ipswich Town midfielder pleaded guilty at South East Suffolk Magistrates’ Court yesterday to two counts each of driving without a valid licence, with no insurance and without having an up-to-date MoT certificate for his car.
He also admitted one
count of failing to give information about the identity of a driver.
It comes after he was caught driving a Mercedes M L320 CDI on the A14 near Bury St Edmunds at 8.30am on January 22 – despite never having passed his driving test in this country and having let his MoT and insurance lapse.
But the footballer, who lives in Coprolite Street, Ipswich, made matters worse when he was spotted by police just six days later committing the same offences while driving
a grey Range Rover along Duke Street at 9.30am on January 28.
Magistrates fined him a total of £7,650 – including £3,000 for the first instance of driving without insurance and £4,000 for the second offence – as well as court costs of £255 and a £15 victim surcharge.
They also gave him what would have amounted to 22 points on his licence – although he received an automatic ban from the road.
Sentencing the footballer, magistrates criticised his
decision to repeat the
same mistakes less than
a week after being caught
driving illegally by police,
saying he should have addressed the problem in the meantime.
Neil Saunders, mitigating, said Edwards had accepted responsibility for his offences and planned to set up a foundation in his home country to coach street children.
