A car valeter has been jailed for 12 months and banned from driving for 25 months after causing £46,000 worth of damage to vehicles at Sytner Group’s Guy Salmon Stratford Land Rover dealership.

Vasile Turcan (36), of no fixed address, used his £200 Ford Mondeo to crash into 12 vehicles – worth an estimated £400,000 – at the dealership in revenge for not getting paid by a car valeting company he had been working for, the Stratford-Upon-Avon Herald reported.

The newspaper reported that prosecutor Olivia Beesley told the court how Turcan had spent the night in his car in the car park of Stratford’s Tesco supermarket and had began drinking watered-down, alcohol-based mouthwash on July 29 before failing in an attempt to withdraw cash from a nearby ATM.

Miss Beesley said that he then drove to the dealership where he drove the car onto the forecourt and damaged the 12 vehicles, using his car to drive into them.

Turcan, who later pleaded guilty to two charges of causing criminal damage and driving with excess alcohol, remained at the scene following the incident and was arrested by police.

The Stratford-Upon-Avon Herald reported that he admitted the offences, explaining that he was upset because he had not been paid £400 in wages for three weeks’ work with Autoclenz at the Guy Salmon site.

He said that Turcan, who had no previous convictions, had hoped the supplier would lose its contract with the dealership as a result of his actions.

Judge Andrew Lockhart QC told Turcan that he had acted “very irresponsibly” after being “angered by reason of someone you believed was not paying you for your work”.

Lockhart said that he was “not impressed” by Turcan’s views in the pre-sentence report that Autoclenz were still in some way to blame.

“It’s not their fault,” he said.

AM contacted Autoclenz for a comment.