A drug kingpin who helped to smuggle up to £1.5m of cocaine across Europe was ordered to pay back part of his empire.
Thomas Maher is currently serving a 14 year prison sentence for using the EncroChat network to ferry drugs from Holland into the UK and Ireland. The haulage firm boss, from Warrington, was a vital "middle man" who decided the location where lorries would stop for handovers, who would be involved in the drop-offs and the prices agreed for his role as a crucial facilitator in the large-scale drug trafficking.
He was originally arrested after 39 dead bodies of Vietnamese nationals were discovered in a lorry in Essex in October 2019.
