A Cambridge academic who stole £1m from a government green-energy project has been jailed for four years.

Dr Ehsan Abdi-Jalebi, 37, was stopped by Border Force officers at Heathrow with £100,000 in cash in a Thorntons Continental chocolate box as he boarded a flight to Tehran in May 2016.

The discovery prompted an investigation by the National Crime Agency, which found he had used fake documents to siphon off money into his own accounts from funding allocated to the development of renewable energy projects.

He had used the funds to develop a property in Iran worth £900,000 and to lease a Maserati sports car as well as a property in Cambridge.

Abdi-Jalebi had won international acclaim for his work on wind turbines and set up his technology firm Wind Technologies Ltd in 2006.

But, he dishonestly received project funding to the value of £2.8m in grant money from Innovate UK, the EU and The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC).

Investigators discovered that the his firm had made a series of grant applications to the government to fund research, but on a number of occasions Abdi-Jalebi had falsified documents, including invoices, accounts and bank statements to show what was happening to the money.