Two Romanian migrants who grew to become skilled shoplifters two months after getting into Britain illegally are jailed for stealing £10,000 of ladies’s clothes in simply someday

Two Romanian migrants who became professional shoplifters just two months after illegally arriving in the UK have been jailed for a one-day £10,000 crime spree. 

Nicolae-Marius Negoita and Maria-Lacramioara Anescu stole more than £10,000-worth of women’s clothing from John Lewis and Next last November 1.

The pair, caught by police at a Milton Keynes shopping centre, were being paid a daily wage of £200 by organised criminals to steal expensive goods, a court heard. The sentences come amid warnings about Romanian gang-related shoplifting.

Laura Nash, prosecuting, said: ‘Both offences happened in the same way, where Mr Negoita attempted to conceal items being stolen while Ms Anescu placed them in a bag.’ 

Police who recovered the clothes – valued at £9,768.60 from John Lewis and £583 from Next – questioned Negoita, 44, who said he was ‘stealing items with Ms Anescu for a form of employment’. 

Ms Nash told Aylesbury Crown Court: ‘He said that some Albanian nationals had presented shoplifting for them as something he could do in exchange for money. 

The court heard neither Negoita nor 30-year-old Anescu had any previous convictions in Britain.

Christopher Fairweather, defending father of one Negoita, said he had been ‘encouraged by other for a promise of £200 a day’. 

The lawyer said: ‘The high value of those goods is not something from which he directly profited. 

‘He came to the UK because of the prospects in his home country and he hoped to gain employment, but his immigration status did not permit him to work.’

Jaclin Bastian, defending mother of two Anescu, who works in a bar in Romania, said her client believed the goods she had stolen from John Lewis ‘were worth in the range of £900’.

Ms Bastian added: ‘She was somewhat shocked when she realised it was in the range of £9,000 from John Lewis. 

‘She initially came to the UK two months prior to the offences with Mr Negoita, who was a friend.

‘They had been promised a job when they came over to the UK, they lived with some other friends in Lincoln. 

‘Her plan was always to return to Romania once this particular job had finished, but when she got to the UK, it transpired the job was actually a lie and there was no job available for her – so she wanted to return to Romania as as soon as possible. 

‘Mr Negoita told her there was another job they could get. He organised it – she never met anyone responsible for organising it.

‘She agreed she would drive them both to Milton Keynes, she should have been paid £200 for her part in that. She just wanted to earn enough money so that she could return to Romania.’ 

Mr Recorder Nigel Sangster said he would give both defendants full credit for admitting theft, which he described as ‘shoplifting on a professional scale’.

The judge jailed Negoita for two years and Anescu for 18 months. 

These sentences come after a series of UK shoplifting crimes by gang-related Romanians.

Bianca Mirica, a mother of three aged 20, was found guilty of shoplifting last August – with police saying she stole Boot’s cosmetics valued at more than £300,000.

Many native Romanians arrived in the UK after 2014 when restrictions on their right to work – following the country’s admission to the EU in 2007 – were lifted.

The vast majority contribute to the economy, working in sectors such as hospitality, agriculture and healthcare where it is sometimes hard to recruit British staff. 

Mirica was said to be used by one of various gangs, mostly run by Romanian organised crime networks, using women to plunder shelves on the High Street.

They are part of a shoplifting epidemic which cost the retail industry £2.2billion in 2023 and 2024 – a record that equates to more than 55,000 incidents per day.

Ex-Metropolitan Police detective chief inspector David McKelvey told the Daily Mail last year: ‘The majority of the organised crime gangs involved in shoplifting are Romanians.

Mr McKelvey, co-founder of private security firm My Local Bobby, added: ‘There is only one reason they come here – to commit crime. They see the UK as rich pickings.

‘They operate in the same way. A man in an expensive vehicle like a Range Rover drops off the team, usually women, who target a particular area, before picking them up at the end of the day and moving on to the next area.’

In August 2024, three women were jailed for a £40,000 crime spree targeting make-up and beauty counters in East Anglia.

A few months earlier, a Romanian shoplifting ring operating in York, including two women, were given prison sentences for stealing £1,282 of fragrances from Browns department store.

Beauty products are coveted because of their small size, high value and the ease with which they can be resold.

British Retail Consortium chief executive Heleb Dickinson has said: ‘Retail crime is spiralling out of control.

‘Every day, criminals are getting bolder and more aggressive.’

Meanwhile, two Romanian crime tourists who struck at jewellers around Europe were jailed in December 2024 after they were caught in the UK.

Married Vadar-Ghimes and Zinca Agafitei, both 46, were arrested after taking ten gold chains worth £15,000 from a jeweller’s in Norfolk.

Enquiries revealed they had swiped jewellery worth another £48,000 from other locations around the Midlands and southern England in just a few weeks.

They had been allowed into the country despite a ‘similar’ spree of distraction thefts and burglaries, mainly at small, independent businesses in Italy, Malta, Turkey and Germany.

They were jailed for 27 months each after admitting three charges of burglary and two of theft. Vadar-Ghimes also admitted a fraud charge.