The Irish gangster reportedly left jail in Spain last Friday after handing over the bail cash.
The veteran 73-year-old criminal was allowed to leave prison after paying €10,000 bail.
He will conținue to be investigated over a pink cocaine bust last December at a two-bedroom property near the Costa Blanca resort of Torrevieja where he was allegedly running a Breaking Bad-style lab said to be capable of producing up to €8 million of drugs.
Well-placed sources said he had left jail on Friday hours after handing over his bail cash.
The conditions of his bail release have not yet been made public, but he is thought to have had to hand over his passport as part of a ban preventing him from leaving Spain and agree to sign on at court regularly.
Gangster John Gilligan
His exact whereabouts last night was not known but he is expected to remain on or near the Costa Blanca for the time being.
Spanish police went public in January with the first images of the drug lab that led to Gilligan’s December 18, 2024 arrest and subsequent remand in prison after appearing before a judge.
They released footage showing the moment heavily-armed officers used battering rams to smash into the Costa Blanca property where they discovered the laboratory and held the Irishman – as well as the moment they found a revolver wrapped in plastic inside a hideaway on an outside wall.
Spanish police sources said at the time the 300 to 600 kilos of drugs the lab could have produced would have had a street value of between €4-8 million.
Gilligan’s new brush with the law came 15 months after he admitted running a Spain-to-Ireland cannabis and sleeping pill smuggling ring and illegally possessing a firearm following an October 2020 Costa Blanca drugs trafficking arrest.
He agreed a plea bargain deal in September 2023 with prosecutors as his trial got underway at a court in Torrevieja south of Alicante and was handed his suspended 22-month jail sentence.
John Gilligan
News in 90 Seconds, Monday September 1st
Gilligan was one of nine people held in the operation that led to his new arrest last December, named Operation Overlord and involving officers from elite Spanish anti-drugs units including one based in the province of Murcia south of Alicante as well as the UK’s National Crime Agency.
Speaking around the time they went public with the arrests, a spokesman for the National Police in Murcia said: “The National Police has dismantled a synthetic drugs lab.
“Nine people have been arrested including the leader of the criminal organisation, a man belonging to the Irish mafia who had expanded his criminal activities to several parts of the eastern Spanish coast and continually changed home between the provinces of Murcia and Alicante to hinder his localisation.
“More than 16 kilos of Tusi or pink cocaine have been seized along with two and a half kilos of cocaine, 540 litres of precursors for synthetic drugs, and a 75 litre drum of Methylamine, which is a key precursor in the manufacture of methamphetamines.
“Officers have also confiscated different instruments and machinery needed to produce drugs, as well as a revolver hidden among bricks.”
The two-bed property near Torrevieja where police are said to have discovered the laboratory belonged to his ex-partner Sharon Oliver according to reports published in Ireland in January.
British national Oliver, who was not among the nine people arrested and is said to have been unaware of Gilligan’s alleged drug activities, was cleared in September 2023 of the drug charges she was facing along with her former boyfriend over their October 2020 arrest.
She had declined at the time to make the plea bargain deal Gilligan and seven other defendants had struck with prosecutors.
Public prosecutors had been demanding a six-year prison sentence for the gangster’s girlfriend for a crime of trafficking with cannabis and another of supplying and exporting medicines without permission.
She denied any knowledge of the courier service smuggling operation her partner confessed to masterminding a day before her one-day trial began, even though police told how 10,000 of the “Zimmos” – sleeping tablets – were found in “plain sight” on a bed in the couple’s villa along with around two kilos of cannabis worth €3,500.
The consignments of pills and drugs were sent in boxes containing children’s toys and flip-flops.
Gilligan, who subsequently claimed he was planning to quit Spain, was ordered to pay fines of just over €14,000 on top of his 22-month suspended prison sentence – nine months for the cannabis trafficking charge, nine months for illegal possession of a firearm and four months for exporting prescription-only drugs without licence.
Prosecutors had said they wanted him jailed for more than eight years if convicted of four charges he was originally due to be tried on before his plea bargain deal.
The gun found in his back garden when he was arrested in October 2020 was initially linked to Irish journalist Veronica Guerin’s 1996 murder which Gilligan was acquitted of.
The seven other men accused alongside him on the drugs and medicine supply and export charge at the court in Torrevieja, who included his son Darren and playboy pal “Fat” Tony Armstrong, were given suspended 18-month prison sentences in September 2023.
Gilligan is understood to have spent the last eight and a half months on remand in Alicante’s Fontcalent Prison.
Court officials are expected to comment later this week on the reasons the Irishman’s bail request was approved and confirm the exact nature of the ongoing criminal investigation he is still at the centre of.
It was not immediately clear last night if he had made previous attempts to be released – ahead of expected charges and trial – which had been turned down.