Dublin businessman Paul Murphy was found guilty and sentenced to six years jail in Switzerland yesterday for funnelling £4.5 million sterling (€7.2 million) of "dirty money" through secret Swiss bank accounts for Colombian cocaine barons.

Murphy, 40, a businessman from Southern Cross, Bray, Co Wicklow, had pleaded not guilty to charges of money laundering and drug trafficking in the court in the Swiss city of Lugano.

Judge Agnese Balestra-Bianchi said there was no doubt he and his co-defendants Andrew Winters, 47, from Surrey, England, and Swiss businessman Eduardo Morandi were part of a "complex money-laundering system" operating in the US, Britain, Italy and Switzerland.

But she said the seven-member jury was dropping a more serious charge of drug trafficking against all three accused.

The court found Winters guilty of acting as Murphy's cash courier and sentenced him to five-and-a-half years in jail.

Judge Balestra-Bianchi accepted the prosecution's case that Murphy had subsequently deposited the notes in Swiss banks and transferred these to accounts in the UK, the US, Italy, Tunisia and Jordan. She described the case as "very serious" and "very important for Switzerland" in its fight against money-laundering.

The judge praised prosecutor Ms Maria Galliani for "great determination in a very difficult case".

"Murphy and Winters only had contact with middlemen in the money laundering chain and not directly with the drug traffickers themselves," Judge Balestra-Bianchi concluded.

"The clients who they did business with were nearly all money launderers. The way in which the case was all in small notes, the way they divided it up and placed in a network of bank accounts suggests it was drug money," the judge said.

Winters, who was living in Miami when he and Murphy were arrested by police in Lugano in December 1998, and Murphy have already served two years and two months in remand. They will probably only have to serve three-quarters of the sentence.

Murphy reacted calmly to the sentence. He and Winters were also ordered to pay a fine of £120,000 sterling each and will be banned from Switzerland for 15 years on their release.