Two men have appeared in court in Co Donegal where they have pleaded guilty to a total of twenty charges arising out of a large-scale people trafficking investigation.<\/p>\n
Georgijs Poniza, 37, and Armen Pogosyan, 32, appeared at Donegal Circuit Court where both were due to stand trial on a number of charges.<\/p>\n
A large number of witnesses including garda\u00ed had been scheduled to give evidence in the trial which was due to last up to six weeks before Judge Simon McAleese.<\/p>\n
The case centres around the trafficking of people who were brought into the country to work at a business in south Donegal.<\/p>\n
However, just before the trial was due to commence, both accused men changed their pleas to guilty on a number of the charges.<\/p>\n
Both men have addresses at Assaroe Falls in Ballyshannon but have been detained in prison after they were arrested by garda\u00ed two years ago.<\/p>\n
The charges to which the accused have pleaded include six different counts of people trafficking on various dates for each.<\/p>\n
The pair also each pleaded guilty to four other charges relating to money laundering and forgery.<\/p>\n
The accused men were both arraigned separately on all charges and pleaded guilty before a jury of twelve people at Letterkenny Courthouse earlier today.<\/p>\n
The first to plead was Pogosyan who simply replied “guilty” after each charge was put to him.<\/p>\n
Pogosyan is an Armenian national with an Uzbekistan passport.<\/p>\n
After a lunchtime recess, Poniza’s legal counsel then told the court that he too wished to plead guilty to ten charges.<\/p>\n
Poniza is a Latvian national.<\/p>\n
Both men were remanded in custody and both cases were adjourned for mention to the next sitting of Donegal Circuit Court on 9 December.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two men have appeared in court in Co Donegal where they have pleaded guilty to a total of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82745,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-82744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}