Paul MacDonald used to play football for Hearts. Then he moved into a rather more lucrative career: drug trafficking. And now he has to pay some of it back.
MacDonald, 37, was jailed for seven years in 2023 after being caught as part of a serious organised crime operation dealing in Class A drugs. Prosecutors have since been chasing the money, and a judge at the High Court in Edinburgh was told a settlement has been reached.
The numbers are staggering. MacDonald is agreed to have made three million pounds from crime. The amount being confiscated? Just under 242,000 pounds. That is less than eight percent. Most of it is cash, with the remainder made up of items including a TAG Heuer watch valued at 4,500 pounds.
His co-accused Craig Balloch, jailed for seven and a half years, faces a similar confiscation of over 200,000 pounds from an identical three million pound criminal benefit.
The details that emerged during the original trial were jaw dropping. Encrypted messages showed MacDonald boasting of selling approximately 50 kilograms of cocaine a month, worth about 1.9 million pounds. In another message he said: “We still got million odd quid after bills are paid.” The cocaine was referred to as “tops” and heroin as “bots.”
MacDonald was first spotted at a drugs handover in Cambuslang in March 2019. The operation ran for over a year before police caught up with him.
There is something deeply unsatisfying about a man who made three million pounds from peddling misery being asked to hand back less than a quarter of a million. The confiscation process is meant to show that crime does not pay. In this case, it paid handsomely, and MacDonald gets to keep the vast majority of it. That feels like a failure of the system.