Belfast prison escaper Mr Anthony Sloan has secured leave from the High Court to challenge the right of the Criminal Assets Bureau to assess him for income tax.
Mr Sloan said he should never have been assessed for alleged unpaid income tax by the CAB because the bureau had since admitted the assessments concerning him were not related to proceeds of crime. Mr Sloan, with an address in Dundalk, Co Louth, who operates a hackney cab business, is claiming that the CAB has abused its powers.
Ms Justice Carroll gave leave to Mr Sloan to seek, by way of judicial review, a declaration that an "anonymous tax inspector" abused his powers by dealing with the tax assessment under the aegis of the CAB rather than permitting it to be dealt with in the normal way by an officer of the Revenue in a non-CAB capacity. He also got leave to seek an order quashing two decisions rejecting his appeals against the assessments.
In other proceedings which are at hearing before the President of the High Court, Mr Justice Finnegan, Mr Sloan is challenging a CAB assessment against him for more than £130,000.
That case began last week and has been adjourned to Friday.
CAB claims Mr Sloan was working as a hackney cab driver between 1993 and 1996.
Mr Sloan says he was unemployed during those years and it was only later that he took up work as a hackney driver.
Mr Sloan also claims that, as a former republican prisoner, he was under such intense Garda surveillance for the years in question that the gardaí would have known if he was working as CAB had claimed.
Yesterday, Mr Michael Forde SC, for Mr Sloan, said the CAB's principal officer, Chief Supt Felix McKenna, had been asked at last week's hearing to indicate what crime he believed Mr Sloan to be involved in but Supt McKenna had declined to say.
Mr Sloan, in his affidavit, said that at last week's hearing Supt McKenna gave evidence that the assessments for tax were not made on the basis that Mr Sloan had income between 1993 and 1996 that was the proceeds of crime.
Counsel for the CAB had confirmed they were ordinary tax recovery actions.
Mr Sloan alleged that arising out of the assessments, attachment notices had been sent in the name of the CAB to his principal customer, the North Eastern Health Area Health Board. Not only did the health board pay over substantial sums to the CAB which were due to him but the board had also terminated all business relationships with him.
Mr Sloan said the board presumably did this in the belief that he was heavily involved in serious crime. He claimed that attachment notices may only be raised in the name of the Revenue Commissioners and not in the name of the CAB.
In his evidence, Mr Sloan said he had been convicted in 1981 in the North on firearms and unlawful imprisonment charges during the "supergrass" trials, but had escaped before sentencing.