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A former Ministry of Defence employee endangered troops by selling useless equipment in a £1.4m planned fraud.

Carl Tiltman duped the Royal Navy into investing in underwater scanning technology after using fake test results in his sales pitch.

The 56-year-old persuaded the MoD to make the purchases while he was chief executive of Dorset-based Subsea Asset Location Technologies.

Tiltman, of Hawkchurch, Devon, has been jailed for three years and four months.

He previously admitted fraud by false representation and fraud by abuse of position, after selling sonar imaging devices and safety equipment worth about £1.4m to the MoD.

Navy personnel were put at risk by carrying out "completely futile" live training operations to test kit which "produced no meaningful results whatsoever", Southwark Crown Court heard.

Judge Christopher Hehir told Tiltman: "Your offending was clearly very serious indeed and in breach of a very high degree of trust reposed in you by both your company and service personnel.

"The offending was protracted in time and caused or contributed to very substantial financial loss and damage... as well as causing some risk to the life and limb of service personnel.

"I'm entirely satisfied you caused a loss of half a million pounds of actual financial losses. It is likely that the losses you actually caused were far higher than that."

Prosecutor John Greany said the deception "started in earnest" in May 2017 when Tiltman began giving "formal presentations about making specific claims about what the scanning equipment could achieve".

However, the results "had been fabricated" by Tiltman, who worked for the MoD in a civilian capacity in the 1980s.

Mr Greany added: "Not all of the roughly £1.4m that might have been lost was in fact lost. Over £800,000 was mostly wasted... the actual loss was over £500,000."

But those figures do not account for the "substantial and additional" staffing, training, and operational costs, the prosecutor said.