How CAB brought down fuel-smuggling ring that cost taxpayers millions
€1.1m seized from associates of ‘Slab’ Murphy goes to State
BEFORE dawn on March 13, 2013, the residents of Ballybinaby, Hackballscross, a hamlet straddling the north Louth-south Armagh border were awakened abruptly from their slumbers.
More than 300 security personnel descended on the area, which was situated in one of the heartlands of the Provisional republican movement during the socalled Troubles.
The swoop was the first public declaration that Operation Loft, which had been set up the previous year by the Criminal Assets Bureau, was in full swing.
The area was well used to security operations in the past, many of them aimed at the alleged activities of its best known resident, Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy.
Slab Murphy was known to police on both sides of the Border at one time as the chief of staff of the Provisional IRA, a claim he always denied, though his admission that, instead of being a terrorist chief, he was a poor farmer, led to his conviction and imprisonment for tax evasion.
Despite his name featuring at the top of the list monitored and investigated by the Special Branch north and south, he had, until then, never been convicted of a criminal offence.
This time Slab Murphy was not on the target list but many of his associates were.
The multi-agency investigation was led by the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) whose focus in Operation Loft was the profits being generated from the illegal trade in fuel laundering and money laundering and, in particular, the suspected involvement of an organised crime group, based in the Louth-Armagh region, with close links to former Provisionals.
An inner and an outer security cordon was set up as more than 200 gardaí and customs officers from the Republic and in excess of 100 personnel from the PSNI and Northern Ireland customs and excise sealed off the area around Ballybinaby.
The CAB was backed up by heavily armed units from the Garda Special Branch, including the Emergency Response Unit, as well as the Regional Support Unit, from the Northern garda command, and uniformed personnel from Louth division as well as the Garda air support unit and the Air Corps.
The British army supported the police and customs raid on the northern side of the Border.
However, somebody in the area had received a tip- off and when searches of 19 locations got under way, the gardaí and the PSNI found the remains of two fires that were still burning when they arrived at the premises owned by one of the Murphy families.
However, CAB officers later revealed in the High Court in
Dublin that a substantial amount of business documents and records had been salvaged from the fires and were later subjected to forensic examination.
One of those, who was out of his bed early that morning, was Slab Murphy, who was stopped at the outer security cordon as he drove through in his car and was questioned but not arrested.
The investigation resulted in the seizure of a huge quantity of documentation, business records and computers as well as a large quantity of cash. A fuel plant, which had a capability of laundering several hundreds of thousands of litres of diesel, was also uncovered. This had the potential to launder 10 million litres of fuel a year, resulting in the loss to the Exchequer of €5.5m.
More than 40,000 litres of laundered fuel were found at the plant, along with over 150 bags of bleaching earth, which is used in the process of removing a marker that distinguishes between white diesel and the green agricultural diesel, and 16 tanks, each containing 1,000 litres of sludge, a waste product left over after laundering.
CAB froze more than 25 bank accounts suspected of being linked to the laundering and initiated action against 21 people and companies, including Base Garage Supplies Ltd, of Ballybinaby, Hackballscross, Co Louth. Slab Murphy was not included in that group.
Yesterday, Ms Justice Carmel Stewart ruled that property seized by CAB from a number of other corporate entities, most of which have now been dissolved, is the proceeds of crime. In the High Court, CAB officers gave evidence they had seized €1.1m in cash. That money has now been forfeited and handed over to the State.
Slab Murphy, whose farm straddles the Border at Ballybinaby, was sentenced in February 2016 to 18 months in jail for non filing of tax returns, related to farming income. He appealed against that decision in January last year but that was dismissed. He was released from prison a year ago.