AN East Lancs businessman is one of 13 awaiting sentence over an illegal dump in rural Lincolnshire.

Environment Agency officials say Robert Malone, 41, who ran Blackburn-registered waste firm NWR 2004, had denied an allegation after a raid on a site in Long Bennington, north west of Grantham, in April 2020.

Malone, from Clitheroe, was convicted of failing to comply with the waste duty of care between dates in October 2019 and May 2020 after a Nottingham Crown Court trial.

His outfit, NWR, registered to Mentor House in Ainsworth Street, Blackburn, had faced a compulsory strike-off by the Registrar of Companies in February but this was suspended in March after an objection was lodged. No accounts have been filed since November 2022.

Malone was in the dock alongside James Baggaley, 38 from Lincolnshire, who was found guilty of knowingly permitting the deposit of waste at the site between similar dates and knowingly permitting the site's operation until April 2022.

Another firm, Sheffield-based Fletcher Plant Ltd, was convicted of failing to comply with waste regulations over the same period.

All three will be sentenced with 10 others, from North Warwickshire and the East Midlands, who had earlier pleaded guilty to related waste offences.

Bosses at the Environment Agency (EA) say they launched Operation Lord to focus on an illegal waste site in the Lincolnshire countryside before raiding it alongside county police.

Surveillance had revealed lorry-loads of shredded waste were regularly being accepted onto the site, which was the size of a football pitch. Investigators say waste was burned daily and buried. And this intensified during the first Coronavirus lockdown in March 2020 before the authorities decided to step in.

EA officers also seized an excavator and a lorry actively depositing more waste at the site during the raid.

The agency says they prosecuted individuals who ran the illegal waste site, burned the waste; drove waste to the site and the landowners. Two waste brokers were also charged.