JOHN TRAYNOR is to be extradited from the Netherlands to Britain to complete a prison sentence from which he absconded in the 1990s.
The extradition of the 62-year-old was ordered by a court in Amsterdam yesterday.
He will likely be extradited in coming days to complete the seven-year jail term imposed 18 years ago for a major fraud.
Traynor has been in custody in the Netherlands since his arrest in August. He has a heart condition and was not in court yesterday.
The Dutch court refused a request from the British authorities that four mobile phones Traynor was found with be surrendered to British police.
The court declined the request because the phones were not connected to the offence at the centre of the extradition hearing.
Traynor is a former associate of gang leader John Gilligan and left Ireland in the aftermath of the 1996 murder of Veronica Guerin.
He has lived in the Netherlands for almost all of that time but was arrested near Amsterdam in August as part of a joint operation by the Dutch and British police against organised crime.
It was only after his arrest that Dutch and British police found he was at large from a British prison.
He had been on the run since November 1992 when he failed to return to Highpoint prison in Suffolk, after a short period of release to travel to Dublin to see his wife and children.
He had been jailed in 1991 for his role in a scam involving using stolen bearer bonds in London to secure a loan from a Swiss bank.
He managed to draw down £200,000 (€240,000) of the loan before the police in London became aware of the scam.
Traynor sent a courier to collect a cheque for £1 million in loan money from a bank in Geneva. The courier was arrested in the Swiss city and Traynor was arrested in London.
Traynor was jailed for seven years in October 1991. He served the first portion of his sentence in Wandsworth prison.
However, he was regarded as a low-risk inmate and was transferred to Highpoint prison, from which he was immediately granted leave to go to Dublin to see his family. He never returned to the English jail.
Despite being on the run, no effort was made by the British authorities to return him to prison. Traynor (62) lived openly in Templeogue, Dublin, and ran a number of garages in the 1980s and 1990s.
He was an associate of both Martin Cahill and John Gilligan. He is said to have arranged for Cahill to lend Gilligan £600,000 to start up his drugs business when he, Gilligan, was released from prison in the early 1990s.
He first came to the public’s attention in 1996 when he applied for an injunction preventing Veronica Guerin alleging he was a drug dealer.
He was granted the injunction after claiming her planned article would put his life at risk from “vigilante types”. His court action started just before her murder and she was dead by the time the injunction was granted.
He had been a criminal source of Guerin’s for about 18 months before she was shot dead. He was arrested in 1997 in the Netherlands in connection with Guerin’s murder but was released without charge and is not now wanted in the Republic. Gardaí and Dutch police had put a surveillance operation in place in 1997 in an effort to track down another member of the Gilligan gang, Brian Meehan.
When they moved in to arrest Meehan at an Amsterdam train station, the Dutch police found Traynor in his company and arrested him too. Meehan was extradited to Ireland and is serving life for Guerin’s murder.