The largest money-laundering operation uncovered in the history of the State was carried on next door to a Garda station, a court has been told.
The business shared a large two-storey building with the station at Dromad, near the Louth-Armagh border, from which it laundered sums of up to £100,000 at a time, delivered in black plastic bags, into sterling.
Yesterday, businessman Kieran Byrne (34), from Annaskeagh, Mountpleasant, Dundalk pleaded guilty at Trim District Court to charges including failure to take steps to identify a customer for foreign exchange, and handling cash representing the proceeds of criminal activity.
Dromad Enterprises operated both as a bureau de change, with a turnover of £17 million a year, and as a private bank, handling up to £60 million for 150 customers.
The court heard the business had many legitimate customers, as it operated 24 hours a day and charged less than other banks.
But Det Insp Gerard Gribben, of the National Bureau of Fraud Investigation, described how a courier from a Dublin criminal gang would arrive at the bureau with a black plastic bag filled with money and ask for Byrne by name. He would be sent away and when he returned an hour later, Byrne would hand him the sterling equivalent.
The premises was searched by gardaí in October 1999, when documents and cash totalling £700,000, along with cheques and bank drafts for another £900,000 were seized and Byrne arrested. The defendant also pleaded guilty yesterday to running the bureau de change without a licence, but said he had ben in correspondence with the Central Bank about getting one at the time of the Garda raid.
Det Insp Gribben agreed with defence counsel Mr Patrick McEntee that the majority of the criminals involved in the offences were smugglers, and that smuggling had been endemic along the Border since partition.
He also accepted that there was no evidence the defendant was involved with the criminal gangs behind the money-laundering charges, but said he had provided them with an essential service.
Det Chief Supt Felix McKenna, of the Criminal Assets Bureau, told the court the defendant had since reached a tax settlement totalling £2.25 million. He said Byrne had learned a hard lesson, but his undertaking to avoid bank work of any kind in the future would assist Garda efforts to police laundering. Sentence will be passed next month.