A judge branded Customs officials “incompetent” after he was forced to allow a drugs baron to keep his ill-gotten gains – said to have a total value of £4.4 million.

Judge Roger Scott threw out a confiscation hearing to make Zafar Iqbal part with alleged assets including a house in Bradford and a flat in Turkey.

Iqbal, 52, of Halifax Road, Odsal, Bradford, was jailed for 11 years in June 2006, reduced to nine by the Court of Appeal.

He was ringleader of a £4 million drug trafficking gang caught transporting and preparing more than 43 kilos of heroin.

Iqbal’s barrister, Balbir Singh QC, said the Proceeds of Crime Application had dragged on so long that Iqbal was due to be released from prison in a little more than four months.

Iqbal, an import-export trader, was back in the dock at Bradford Crown Court yesterday to hear Judge Scott criticise the “incompetence and negligence” of Revenue and Customs officials working on the case.

The judge rejected the Crown’s claim that overstepping the two-year time limit was down to exceptional circumstances.

“On no conceivable view are there any exceptional circumstances here to allow this case to proceed further,” Judge Scott said, dismissing the application to extend the time limit.

Mr Singh told the judge the hearing had to go ahead by January 2008, two years after Iqbal pleaded guilty. Tahir Khan, for the Crown, argued that it was not responsible for the delay.

But Judge Scott criticised lawyers at HM Revenue and Customs for doing “absolutely nothing” to move the case forward. He said theirs was “not a very well run office”.

The drugs conspiracy involved heroin being hidden in flattened cardboard boxes. Revenue and Customs investigators teamed up with West Yorkshire Police in a surveillance operation.

When officers swooped on Iqbal’s home they found the haul of heroin compressed and slotted into specially-constructed panels in the boxes.

After the case, a spokesman for the London-based Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office, whose Manchester department dealt with the case, said: “The Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office takes seriously the comments made by the judge in court. We will review them carefully.”