Convicted Irish fraudster John Traynor is expected to be handed over to the British authorities in the coming days after a court in Amsterdam today ordered his extradition.
The former member of John Gilligan’s gang had absconded from a British jail while serving a seven year sentence for his part in fraud 18 years ago worth an estimated Ir£4 million at the time.
The court upheld a warrant under the European Extradition treaty requesting that the 62-year-old be sent back to England where he could serve up to five years in jail.
Dublin-born Traynor was arrested in the Amstelveen area of the Dutch capital on August 24th. The three-judge extradition court was told that he had been living in the Netherlands for the past 14 years without any residency papers but that his son was legally resident in the country.
Traynor, who ran garages in Dublin in the 1980s and 1990s, had been on the run from a British prison since November 1992, the court heard.
Traynor failed to return to the prison after being granted a period of temporary release to visit his wife and four children in Templeogue, south Dublin. He had been jailed the previous year for his role in a scam involving stolen bearer bonds in London.
He had changed the numbers on the bonds and used them as security when he applied for a loan from a Swiss bank that he said was intended to buy a holiday complex in the Caribbean.
He managed to draw down £200,000 (€240,000) from the loan before the Met Police and fraud squad in London became aware of the scam.
When Traynor sent a runner to collect a cheque for £1 million in loan money from a bank in Geneva, the courier was arrested there and Traynor detained in London.
Traynor was convicted and 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.
Traynor lived openly in Dublin and it does not appear any effort was made by the UK authorities to have him returned there to serve the remainder of his sentence.
He was an associate of the notorious Dublin criminals 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.
After the murder of Sunday Independent crime journalist Veronica Guerin in 1996, Gilligan fled to the Netherlands.