CAB puts Galway criminals under the cosh

There are 20 suspected criminals in Galway currently being targeted by the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) which confiscates the proceeds of crime.

CAB Chief Bureau Officer, Chief Superintendent Patrick Clavin, said there were nine asset profilers working in the Galway division.

He declined to give details of the Galway cases at this week’s Galway City Joint Policing Committee in case it would alert the targets or they attempted to put their assets beyond the reach of the agency.

He said the organisation was very secretive about the criminals they were investigating for fear they tried to buy back the assets or damage them before being put up for sale.

While he did not want to frighten people in Galway that CAB was coming after them, he wanted to publicly acknowledge the 20 Galway cases currently being pursued to correct any criticism that the bureau was only centred on wealthy Dublin underworld figures.

Following a change in the legislation, CAB could now go after assets worth just €5,000 instead of €13,000. Last year the agency confiscated a car worth €9,000, while it netted a haul of four houses, 40 cars and cash worth €2.7 million from a branch of the Kinihan drugs cartel.

He highlighted a Cabra-based drugs operation, where two brothers had quietly built up a portfolio of nine houses. When one of them was jailed, his wife had a house worth €1.6 million built in the south-east of the country so that he would have somewhere to move to on his release.

One of the biggest cases pursued by CAB last year involved a Killarney gang who were intimidating elderly people into paying them for shoddy work on their homes.

Its longest-running case involved John Gilligan, the drugs kingpin whose gang killed journalist Veronica Guerin, an assassination which led to the founding of CAB. It took CAB 21 years before it managed to confiscate his substantial portfolio of properties.

See full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune.