MR John Gilligan, who is facing charges under drug trafficking legislation, has been committed for trial in Woolwich on March 17th.
At Belmarsh Magistrates Court in London yesterday the stipendiary magistrate, Mr David Cooper, outlined the case against Mr Gilligan during a 20 minute written submission to the court. He said he believed Mr Gilligan did have a case to answer before a jury. However, Mr Cooper said that in his mind, the prosecution had not established the case against Mr Gilligan "beyond reasonable doubt".
Mr Gilligan, who was arrested at Heathrow Airport on October 6th last with £330,000 in his suitcase, has been charged under Section 49 1(a) of the Drug Trafficking Act 1994, which relates to the concealment of money representing the proceeds of drug trafficking.
He has also been charged under Section 50 (1) of the same Act which concerns the proceeds of drug trafficking for another person.
A third charge has been brought against Mr Gilligan under Section 1 of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981, with regard to removing the proceeds of drug trafficking from Britain.
On his decision to send Mr Gilligan for trial at Woolwich Crown Court, Mr Cooper said that although various documents had been produced by Mr Gilligan to account for carrying large sums of money to and from the Netherlands via Heathrow Airport, the suspicion remained that this money was the proceeds of drug trafficking.
Mr Cooper ruled that there was a primafacie case to answer on all the charges against Mr Gilligan.
He referred specifically to the charge of concealment of money, saying: "I am satisfied that there is evidence that the jury could conclude that there was concealment of some sort."
"It is important not, to, ignore the cumulative effect of the surrounding circumstances," Mr Cooper said, when he referred to the allegation against Mr Gilligan that he had paid a courier to drive goods from Cork to the Ambassador Hotel in Dublin.
The evidence brought by the prosecution that the addresses on these goods were fictitious, combined with the number of flights to the Netherlands which Mr Gilligan and another member of his family had undertaken in recent years, could also not be ignored, Mr Cooper said.
With this evidence and the circumstances of Mr Gilligan's arrest, Mr Cooper said it was not an unreasonable inference to draw that Mr Gilligan had concealed money to avoid a drug trafficking offence.
Whether he knew which drug trafficking offence he wished to avoid was another issue, the court was told, but it was also not unreasonable that Mr Gilligan had "a general sense of the possibility of prosecution and did what he did to avoid it".
It is understood that an application to transfer the trial to the Old Bailey in London may be made by Mr Gilligan's counsel, Ms Clare Montgomery.