A company director faces up to a decade in jail for possessing chemicals - used to make illegal drugs - at a string of warehouses across Sydney and the Hunter.
Michael Snounou, 46, pleaded guilty on Monday November 20 for possessing precursors for the manufacture of prohibited drugs.
He received a delivery to his Bellevue Hill home of 400 kilograms of iodine, which is used in methamphetamine, in September 2013.
He took the iodine to an auto electrician in Marrickville, where it was loaded into a white van.
The delivery was initially destined for the warehouse of chemical company Cyndan. Snounou became the director here in 2009.
Another 400 kilograms of iodine was delivered straight to the Marrickville warehouse three days later.
Police raided a meth lab in Ourimbah on 23 December 2009, where they found containers marked with batch numbers and linked to Cyndan.
An empty container from the same September delivery was found at another lab at Jerrys Plains in the Hunter region in January 2014.
A number of other drug-related incidents connected to Snounou were investigated across Sydney, including the delivery of a tonne of iodine in 2017.
Snounou was seen pouring that iodine into unmarked buckets, which he placed in his Range Rover. The van was taken to South Granville, where the buckets were moved into a truck.
About six months later, the driver of that truck was stopped on the Southern Tablelands in a vehicle carrying 11 kilograms of methamphetamine.
More white buckets were found nearby at a "very large clandestine lab" which took police three days to search in September 2017.
Snounou will be sentenced in February.
He will avoid a trial for separate import charges carrying a potential life sentence after they were dropped on November 20.
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Lucinda Garbutt-Young
Lucinda Garbutt-Young is a journalist at the Newcastle Herald, where she covers breaking news, court and other general news. Do you have a story? Email Lucinda at l.garbutt-young@austcommunitymedia.com.au
Lucinda Garbutt-Young is a journalist at the Newcastle Herald, where she covers breaking news, court and other general news. Do you have a story? Email Lucinda at l.garbutt-young@austcommunitymedia.com.au
