John ‘Kenny’ Collins will serve three more years for failing to comply with confiscation order

The Hatton Garden heist ringleader John “Kenny” Collins has been sent back to prison after failing to pay back millions of pounds stolen in the raid.

Collins, 78, was released at the end of last year after serving half of his seven-year sentence for the £13.7m raid.

He and his fellow gang members Brian Reader, 80, Daniel Jones, 64, and Terry Perkins, who died in prison last year aged 69, were given one of the biggest confiscation orders in Scotland Yard’s history.

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They jointly owe £5.75m, which prosecutors say is available in hidden assets from unrecovered jewellery, gold, gems and cash, and individually owe additional amounts from realisable assets such as properties in the UK and abroad.

Michael Seed, 58, an alarm specialist known as Basil, was jailed for 10 years in March after becoming the 10th person convicted in connection with the 2015 Easter Bank Holiday weekend heist. Seed is likely to face a similar confiscation order.

Collins’s bill came to a total of £7.6m, including the proceeds of his share of a house in Islington, north London, and a property in Spain.

An earlier hearing was told he had handed over £732,000 and recently received an offer of £742,500 for his London home, while his Spanish flat was now worth just €99,000 (£90,000) rather than the £350,000 estimated last year.

On Thursday the district judge Richard Blake sent Collins back to prison for 2,309 days – more than six years – and told him he would serve half.

He said: “I recognise that Mr Collins is in his 70s. It was entirely his decision to commit that crime at a time in his life when most people hope to enjoy a quiet retirement. He chose not to have a quiet retirement but participated with others in a serious criminal enterprise to make substantial gain. The consequences of his crime were to cause very significant loss, amounting to many millions of pounds worth of property to the victims.”

The judge said his decision to send Collins back to prison was not to pass a second sentence but to enforce the order.

“It is important that perpetrators of crime do not profit from their conduct. The principle is as important whatever the age of the defendant who committed the crime,” he said. “I am satisfied Mr Collins has wilfully refused and culpably neglected to cooperate in the realisation of his identifiable assets and in what the learned judge has found as the hidden assets.”

Jones has already been sentenced to seven years after failing to pay back any of the cash. Prosecutors hope to recoup some money from Perkins’s estate. Reader has not paid back a penny but could avoid going back to prison because of his poor health.

At an earlier hearing, the prosecutor Philip Stott said Reader’s lawyers had served evidence suggesting he was “incapable of participating in these proceedings effectively on the grounds of the onset of dementia”. Prosecutors will instruct their own medical experts before a confiscation hearing on 3 October.