A FORMER charity manager has confessed to stealing nearly £10,000 from a community action group in Burnley after a lengthy legal battle.

Prosecutors say David Stevenson, 33, helped himself to a series of unauthorised extras while running Brunshaw Action Group, including a holiday to France and the hire of a car.

Stevenson, of Williams Road, Burnley, was originally charged with stealing £3,258 from the now-defunct action group between the start of January 2013 and December 2014.

He appeared before the town’s magistrates court as long ago as May 2015, to initially deny the allegation.

However the Crown Prosecution Service had been intending to accuse the former charity manager of thefts amounting to more than £19,000, over a similar period of time.

But Stevenson, after being arrested on a warrant for failing to attend Burnley Crown Court, eventually pleaded guilty to the theft of £9,850 from the charity.

Prosecutor Kevin Donnelly said that the original allegations had centred on two strands of offending, the first being the unauthorised use of the charity’s bank account to pay for things such as a holiday to France and hire car fees.

“The second category relates to him having paid himself what was in effect overtime and additional expenses, which he says he was entitled to because he was working additional hours and that was known to committee members of the charity,” he told the court.

Mr Donnelly confirmed that the second category would not be the subject of further litigation and the guilty plea to the £9,850 sum was acceptable to the prosecution.

Guy Mathieson, defending said that clearly some of the other alleged sums involved in the case, some of which Stevenson would say had been repaid, should be the subject of civil litigation rather than a criminal case.

Adjourning the case for pre-sentence reports until July 8 at Preston Crown Court, Judge Simon Newell said that the seriousness of the case, whatever the final sum arrived upon, revolved around the fact money had been taken “which causes a charity to fail”.

Stevenson, who is understood to have left the charity in the summer of 2014, was granted bail by Judge Newell, who warned him that a custodial sentence “would be in the court’s mind” when he next appeared in the dock.