The wife of a despicable businessman who injured 81 people by engineering a devastating gas explosion sobbed in court as he was locked up for 20 years.
Pascal Blasio, now 57, tampered with a gas valve in his failing furniture showroom, 'Homes in Style' on Bebington Road, New Ferry, leading to the "colossal" blast on March 25, 2017.
The enormity of the explosion, which destroyed or damaged around 63 properties, led Wirral Council officials to describe it as the worst disaster the town has faced in peace-time.
Today, two years and seven months after the disaster, the traumatised victims of the blast finally saw Blasio face justice as he was jailed for 20 years at Liverpool Crown Court.
Last week, after a retrial, a jury reached unanimous guilty verdicts on one count of causing an explosion likely to endanger life and one of fraud by false representation.
Judge Thomas Teague, QC, sentencing Blasio, told him to stand before delivering a searing set of sentencing remarks.
He described how the the disgraced grandad -of-seven had opened a valve, turned on an electric gas fire and left "anyone who happened to be in the immediate vicinity, at the time of the inevitable explosion, to their fate."
"You did not care who else might suffer"
Describing the crime as "carefully planned," the judge said: "It was essential to your purpose that the entire contents of the shop should be utterly destroyed.
"That is because nothing less would have resulted in an indemnity of the size you needed to secure, and, in any case, partial destruction would have exposed the fact that you had emptied the showroom beforehand of most of the stock for the loss of which you intended to claim....
"Your scheme could not succeed without obliterating this large building — including the performing arts school on the floor above — and, in the process, seriously damaging surrounding properties and exposing large numbers of people to the risk of death or severe injury."
"It did not matter to you that the proprietors of the school above, who had built up a successful enterprise over many years by investing their savings and a good deal I of hard work, should lose their lives’ work.
"It did not matter to you that the owners of the highly-regarded Chinese restaurant ,opposite your showroom, should not only lose their livelihood but their home as well.
"You did not care who else might suffer, as long as you could swindle the insurers out of £50,000, money to which you knew perfectly well you had no right."
Henry Riding, prosecuting, had earlier told the court it was "truly a miracle" that no-one was killed.
"You had the hypocrisy to portray yourself as a victim of these events"
However some victims received devastating injuries, with the worst being 21-year-old Lewis Jones, who suffered "life-changing" brain damage while sitting at a bus-stop.
Judge Teague said: "You were aware of the risks, yet you went ahead with your planned insurance fraud.
"During your trial, with the dishonest help of your wife and son, you had the hypocrisy to portray yourself as a victim of these events.
"You have shown no remorse or concern for anyone but yourself. You have exhibited human selfishness in an almost chemically pure state...
"You knew, as in fact transpired, that he explosion would be an extremely powerful and ultimately uncontrollable one.
"That, in my judgement, amounts to as high a degree of recklessness as it is possible to evisage."
Earlier, David Mason, QC, representing Blasio, most recently of Gillingham in Kent, said his client's instructions had not change - meaning he still denied causing the explosion.
However he told the court, that based on the prosecution case, it "may be that this was a massively, massively misjudged situation with wholly unintended consequences"
The court heard Blasio's mother was terminally ill and would die before he walked free from prison.
Mr Mason said: "Mr Blasio has lost everything now, his family will suffer; we only discovered this week that he has seven grandchildren who all live in the south east of England and will be unable to see him.
"He, and particularly his family, have suffered two and half years of vitriol and disquiet from members of the community, perhaps understandably, but it has been a very difficult time."
He said Blasio had been intimidated in prison from inmates with links to the New Ferry area.
At a previous hearing the company who supplied the gas to the property, Contract Natural Gas (CNG), pleaded guilty to an offence under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.
CNG were fined a total of £320,000 and ordered to pay £50,000 towards the prosecution costs.
Speaking after the hearing, Assistant Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, Natalie Perischine, said: "I hope that today means the people of New Ferry can now start to draw a line under that night and start to rebuild their lives knowing that Blasio will spend a considerable amount of time paying for his greedy and selfish actions in prison.
"This prosecution would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the team of detectives who have worked on this case, viewing hundreds of hours of CCTV footage and taking over 750 statements, including 115 victim impact statements, in order to bring a successful prosecution."
