CAB TARGETS REPORTED CORK DRUG-IMPORTER

The Criminal Assets Bureau has targeted a Cork businessman as part of its
continuing crackdown on suspected drug-traffickers, which has already
resulted in several suspected major drug-dealers moving abroad to avoid
large tax bills.

The man, who is married and in his 40s, is a former associate of a convicted
Cork drug-dealer who was last week reported in connection with attempts to
smuggle heroin and cocaine into Britain in the 1980s.

The man, who has recently put up property for sale, was a close associate of
another suspected drug-trafficker from Cork who is understood to have fled
to Amsterdam after getting a tax bill for IEP640,000 from the Criminal
Assets Bureau.

CAB officers recently raided the businessman's luxurious home outside Cork
city and seized a number of documents which they hope will enable them to
prove he made his money from large drug imports.

The businessman is believed to have travelled abroad with the suspected
traffickers between 1982 and 1992 when they were involved in organising
major drug shipments of cannabis and ecstasy into Ireland.

Although he has not been as active in recent years, the businessman has
accumulated considerable wealth from crime, allowing him to buy substantial
properties around the city.

But unlike a number of other Cork figures targeted by the CAB, he has
retained the properties, leaving him vulnerable to having his assets seized
by the CAB, should he fail to mount a successful legal challenge to the
CAB's likely tax demand.

Informed sources say a number of other Cork criminal figures managed to sell
off their properties before the CAB closed in, allowing them to safely
transfer sizeable sums abroad.

In 1997, an English criminal left his Kinsale home after getting a tax
demand for IEP100,000 from the CAB. The bureau seized IEP100,000 worth of
jewellery from his home and later auctioned his property.

The English man had come to Kinsale and was beginning to make contact with a
number of Cork drug-dealers before he fled the State. He is now understood
to be living in the south of Spain where he is believed to be associated
with two men who had roles in the murder of Veronica Guerin in 1996.