Antonio Boparan hit car with passenger Cerys Edwards at 71mph and she died nine years later

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A millionaire’s son has been jailed for 18 months after admitting causing the death of a girl who died nine years after a car crash.

Cerys Edwards, who had just turned one, was left paralysed, unable to breathe unaided and needing 24-hour specialist care after the car she was in was hit head-on by a Range Rover on 11 November 2006.

She died in October 2015, a month before her 10th birthday, with medical experts concluding that her death was “a consequence of her spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury sustained in collision”.

The driver was Antonio Boparan, son of Ranjit Singh Boparan, known as the “chicken king” after founding the 2 Sisters food group and amassing an estimated fortune of more than £500m.

On Thursday the 32-year-old, who was 19 at the time of the crash, pleaded guilty at Birmingham crown court to causing death by dangerous driving.

Sentencing him, Judge Melbourne Inman QC said Boparan had showed “an arrogant disregard for the safety of others”, causing “catastrophic” injuries to Cerys.

“The quality of her short life was destroyed, as in many ways was that of her parents,” said Inman. “Finally, Cerys yielded to her injuries and disabilities and your criminal actions eventually took her life away from her.”

Boparan was banned from driving for three years and nine months. As he was sentenced, he blew out his cheeks, turned to his father in the public gallery and buttoned up his suit jacket before being taken down to the cells.

The court heard that Boparan had been travelling at 80mph in a 30mph zone on Streetly Lane, Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, before the accident.

When a car emerged in front of him from a junction, he was unable to stop and swerved head-on – at a speed calculated at 71mph – into a Jeep Cherokee driven by Cerys’s mother Tracey. Her then-husband Gareth was a passenger and Cerys was securely fastened in a rear car seat.

In court for Boparan’s plea, Gareth Edwards, who has since separated from Cerys’s mother, said that just a week before the crash the family had held a “big party” for Cerys, “but nine days later I was performing CPR on my daughter, thanks to Antonio Boparan’s selfish stupidity”.

Speaking immediately afterwards, he said the family had “finally got justice” for Cerys but described the length of the jail term as “a complete insult”.

He said: “We have been left with a life sentence without our beautiful little girl whose precious life was stolen from us.”

Cerys’s parents were both injured, as were two passengers in the car behind their jeep. But Cerys sustained what one doctor described as a “catastrophic severance of the high spinal cord” and was left brain damaged.

In September 2014, she was admitted to Birmingham children’s hospital for a “deteriorating respiratory condition”. She would never leave hospital and died just over a year later.

In 2007, Boparan was convicted for severely injuring Cerys and jailed for 21 months. He served six months and three days.

The court heard that his father made a £200,000 payment to Cerys’s parents to buy a house suitable for the child’s needs and attended a funeral service for her.

Before sentencing, Boparan’s barrister, James Sturman, said he was guilty of “a stupid and immature piece of bad driving at high speed”.

But he argued: “The boy of 19 is not the man of 32 you are sentencing today ... It would be inhumane to return him to custody.”

An application for bail, pending an appeal of sentence, was rejected.