Bureau preparing to seize €6.6m in criminal assets

THE Criminal Assets Bureau is preparing to seize €6m worth of cash and properties in the new year. The agency - made up of garda, revenue and social welfare experts - last week got the keys to property worth €5m belonging to a major cigarette smuggler.

The handover of the Dublin city centre premises by Noel Duggan to CAB officers was in a bid to pay off a tax assessment by CAB of up to €6m.

Now CAB investigators are ready to pounce on 1m stashed in a special savings account belonging to a jailed paramilitary and suspected smuggler. Convicted Real IRA man Liam Campbell is understood to have lodged €500,000 in a bank in Dundalk, Co Louth, in a single transaction under a false name in 1998.

The five-year savings plan is due to reach maturity next year and CAB intends to seize the cash then, believing it to the proceeds of a crime, specifically cross-border smuggling. Campbell is serving a five-year sentence at Portlaoise Prison for membership of the Real IRA. CAB served him with a €750,000 tax assessment last month.

Campbell, a 39-year-old farmer from Dundalk, is suspected of huge massive amounts of money from cross-border smuggling. CAB officers also hope to collect as much as 5m in the new year from the sale of Noel Duggan’s extensive property in Dublin.

Duggan, 44, handed over the keys to the head of the Criminal Assets Bureau, Det Chief Supt Felix McKenna, and CAB Legal Officer Barry Galvin.

Duggan and fellow business partner Christy Dunne, 62, were assessed by CAB as owing almost 6m in unpaid taxes from smuggling operations between 1993 and 1999.