A FORMER police sergeant has been warned to expect a significant prison sentence after being found guilty of being involved in an £85,000 fraud based on his son’s Sedbergh-based ambulance business.

Dalvin Dawkins, 54, helped launder money through his own bank account after it had been obtained via the business through a series of bogus credit card payments.

Carlisle Crown Court heard that he, along with his son and daughter-in-law, were involved in fraudulent transactions connected with Sedbergh Lifeline, a business that provides first aid care, training and equipment from Main Street, Sedbergh, where they all live.

The jury heard they made money via the complexities of the firm’s credit card payment system by putting through bogus transactions.

Dalvin Dawkins – who is now retired but was serving as a Lancashire Constabulary sergeant at Morecambe at the time – denied one charge of a £1,500 fraud, one of laundering £84,050 and five of possessing a total of £22,675 he knew had come from criminal activity.

He was found guilty of all of them except possessing £675 of the ‘dirty money’.

His son Matthew Dawkins, who is 21, had already pleaded guilty to 33 charges of fraud, totalling nearly £100,000, and one of £84,050 money laundering.

He and his father were remanded in custody and will be sentenced on Friday.

Matthew Dawkins’s 20-year-old wife Zarina Gray Dawkins pleaded not guilty to 13 charges of fraud amounting to £19,500 and one of laundering £2,500.

She was found guilty today of the money laundering and one of fraud but not guilty of the rest.

She was allowed bail and she too will be sentenced on Friday.

During the trial prosecuting counsel Arthur Gibson told the jury that the firm’s credit card payment terminal – linked to Streamline, a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Scotland – was installed in February 2009, when the firm told the bank its annual turnover was about £90,000 a year, of which about £30,000 could be paid by credit or debit cards.

But, Mr Gibson said, in the next 50 days more than £84,000-worth of transactions – almost as much as the whole year’s predicted turnover – were put through the terminal.

He alleged that the three defendants had used their own cards to take advantage of the payments system.

Mr Gibson said all three were also involved in laundering.

In their defence Dalvin Dawkins and Zarina Gray Dawkins told the jury they had no idea that what they were doing was illegal or that the money they were processing had been obtained fraudulently.

They said they got involved only because they wanted to help Matthew Dawkins who, they believed, was running a legitimate business.

After the verdicts today Judge Paul Batty QC said Dalvin Dawkins had been involved in ‘significant and substantial fraud’.

He said it would be his ‘melancholy task’ to send the former policeman to jail.