Jo Jo Convenience Faces Loss of Licence
Store found to have repeatedly sold smuggled tobacco and alcohol
Jo Jo Convenience Store on Fulham High Street
January 15, 2026
A Fulham High Street off-licence faces closure after repeatedly selling illegal tobacco and alcohol products.
Jo Jo Convenience Store sold counterfeit shishas and duty-free cigarettes and vodka to undercover officers multiple times between January 2022 and March 2025, a licence review before Hammersmith and Fulham Council shows.
The council’s Trading Standards team is calling for the shop’s licence to be revoked. “More than being ‘just’ illegal, goods of this nature can be unsafe,” officers said in the licence review report.
The report said Trading Standards officers seized 529 illegal e-cigarettes from Jo Jo Convenience during a raid in January 2022. The smokes contained six times the maximum amount of e-liquid and 5per cent nicotine, compared to the maximum permitted of 2pc.
The licence holder at the time, Gajinder Singh Sachdeva, said the items had been brought in from “a caller to the shop”. The business received a warning letter.
In May that same year, officers conducted a secret test purchase and collected two packs of Polish-market Marlboro Gold cigarettes, which were illegal to sell in the UK, for £8 each. A month later, they returned with a detection dog and uncovered a large quantity of concealed illegal cigarettes, counterfeit shishas and Smirnoff vodka, which was genuine but owing UK duty.
Officers said there was no way Mr Sachdeva could have known the alcohol was genuine. Mr Sachdeva was interviewed under caution and said the goods were delivered to the store by the same caller “3-4 days” before the seizure. Trading Standards claimed this was “impossible” as they were spotted a month earlier during a test purchase.
Mr Sachdeva said the vodka was not for sale but couldn’t explain why he restocked his shop with illegal cigarettes. He repeatedly apologised.
The council withdrew plans to take Mr Sacheva to court after he offered to put up signs in his shop admitting the offences and paid a contribution to the authority’s costs. He received a warning letter.
In October 2024, officers carried out another test purchase and bought a packet of Marlboro Gold marked as “for duty-free sale only” for £10. It is believed the new licence holder, Kalyan Singh, sold the cigarettes but this cannot be confirmed, the report said.
Officers returned twice over the next two months and were able to purchase more duty-free cigarettes. Officers returned once more in March 2025 and requested a packet of Marlboro Gold.
Mr Singh instead offered a pack of Vogue Frisson cigarettes marked as duty-free for £8. The next day Trading standards visited with a detection dog.
Mr Singh was the only person working in the shop and despite being told the reason for the visit and asked to say where illegal goods were being kept, he made no attempt to help officers, the report said.
Officers retrieved 25 packs of duty-free cigarettes, seven large packs of hand-rolling tobacco, 33 oversized vapes and six bottles of Smirnoff Vodka owing duties. According to officers, tobacco products were concealed around the shop in crisp boxes, behind food on shelves and in boxes marked as containing legal e-cigarettes. The bottles of vodka were on display on the shelves behind the counter.
In October last year, Mr Singh admitted to selling illegal cigarettes and said Mr Sachdeva, who he said was his boss, had brought them in. Mr Sachdeva said the goods came from a supplier who visited the shop.
They cost £5 a packet and were sold on for £8, the report states. Mr Sachdeva said he bought them a month before the seizure which officers said was “clearly a lie” given the long history of test purchases. Officer said despite only becoming the licence holder in May last year, Mr Singh has been working at the premises for around four years.
In the report, officers said studies have shown “cheap” tobacco makes it easier for people to start smoking and harder to quit. They said non-EU cigarettes do not contain self-extinguishing properties that stop them burning if they are dropped or carelessly discarded, resulting in a much higher risk of house fires.
They also said the business could not have been certain about the content of illicit tobacco, nicotine and alcohol products, or whether they were safe to sell.
They wrote, “There should also be no confusion about how such goods are distributed. The vast majority of illicit products of the nature purchased and seized from this business are distributed by organised crime groups, which are most likely to be involved in other – even more serious – criminal activity. There has been a clear and repeated failure to promote the ‘prevention of crime’ objective.”
A licence review will take place on Tuesday, 20 January at Hammersmith and Fulham Council.
Ben Lynch - Local Democracy Reporter