Boatyard worker was stealing £1m yacht one piece at a time

A boat engineer who tried to steal a yacht from his employers piece-by-piece escaped jail yesterday.

James Light, 35, had hoped to build his own boat by using the £55,000 worth of parts he had smuggled out from boat manufacturer Sunseeker in Poole, Dorset.

Over seven years he gathered hundreds of items including junction boxes, a radar mast, lifting straps and stern lights.

Light, 35, carefully packed his bounty into more than 100 boxes and piled them, up in a lock-up garage awaiting the day he would assemble his own Sunseeker - one piece at a time.

The one substantial item missing from the collection was a hull - which, as a Sunseeker spokesman said, "he could hardly have walked out with".

Although Light, who had worked for Sunseeker for 11 years, claimed he had been obtained the parts legitimately from a third party, he admitted charges of theft and handling stolen goods.