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 £640,000 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 £100,000 from the CAB. The bureau seized £100,000 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.