The businessman who was the target of Sharon Collins’s hitman-for-hire plot has paid almost €200,000 trying to clear her name, The Sunday Times has learnt. P J Howard, who was the target of a hitman hired by Collins to kill him, is paying a number of private investigators to find evidence to help her to appeal.

Collins, who used the pseudonym Lying Eyes when she tried to hire an assassin on the internet, was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment last week for conspiring to have Howard and his two sons killed.

Giving his first interview in Spain last week, Howard insisted that Collins was the victim of an extortion racket led by Teresa Engle, an American granted immunity from prosection by the state. “There is something in Ireland that could finish this case,” he said. “I will continue to look for \ and I will find it eventually.”

Engle is the wife of Essam Eid, the would-be internet assassin, and was the state’s key witness in the case against Collins and Eid, who was also sentenced to six years’ imprisonment last week.

Howard has commissioned an artist’s sketch of “Maria Marconi”, an online writing tutor who Collins claims used private information to set her up. Howard is convinced that

Engle, Eid and Marconi plotted to extort money from him and to set Collins up as the fall guy.

Howard, whose wealth is valued at €60m, understands why people believe that Collins is guilty. “If I wasn’t involved in this myself I would believe the justice system, but people haven’t been given all the facts,” he said.

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