Former glamour model's ex-fiance jailed

06 November 2009

Victoria Yallop

Footballers' Wives actress Victoria Yallop is in the clear after a charge of possession with intent to supply £150,000 worth of cocaine was dropped.

But ex-fiancé Steven Brace was jailed for four years after admitting drug offences.

He was a week off marrying the actress and former glamour model, 31, who played Holly McGuire in the ITV show, when police arrested the pair.

Brace, 37, had pleaded guilty to possession with intent to supply three kilos of the class A drug, cultivating 56 cannabis plants and abstracting electricity.

Prosecutors decided not to pursue Yallop on the same charges. She had pleaded not guilty.

Brace, a property developer, planned to sell the drugs as a way of making money quickly after his business hit hard times, Basildon Crown Court heard last week.

Tyrone Belger, defending, claimed that when Brace dreamed up the plan his judgment had been clouded by his cocaine addiction.

It was said he had just tried and failed to unload the cocaine to a dealer when police raided his £300,000 house in Squirrels Heath Lane, Hornchurch, in June.

Officers searching the home, which Brace shared with the former page three model, found the bundles of cocaine in a wardrobe and a cannabis factory in a large garage in the back garden. They also found nearly £200,000 in cash in the boot of a Bentley Continental car.

Brace pleaded guilty to the drugs offences during a hearing in September and was sentenced last week. He pleaded not guilty to concealing criminal property and that charge was dropped.

Yallop now lives in Chafford Hundred.