A HAMPSHIRE woman ordered to pay £70,000 compensation after duping an elderly man in a charity scam, says she cannot meet the deadline for payment.

Brenda Ford-Sagers, 63, and her husband, Robert, were both originally jailed for three years after admitting at Southampton Crown Court in 2004 to nine counts of theft, which included a derelict lighthouse.

She was said to have set up a bogus charitable trust after falling behind on mortgage repayments on the Eilean Glas lighthouse on a Scottish island.

She had persuaded her husband, a financial adviser, to invest money in the trust in the estate of a friend and former client, Robert Walter, when he worked as a sales assistant for Allied Dunbar.

At the time Mr Walter was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and has subsequently died. At a confiscation hearing, Mrs Ford-Sagers, from Mottisfont, was ordered to pay £72,922 through the sale of the lighthouse, a further property and a motor home.

She was warned that if she failed to keep the committment, she would face a further two years behind bars.

She challenged the figure at the Court of Appeal, claiming her right to the lighthouse had been removed under Scottish law, and the figure was reduced to £72,000 which was ordered to be paid by March 22.

Mrs Ford-Sagers has now returned to Southampton Crown Court where through barrister Ben Stephenson she maintained she did not have the "wherewithall" to meet the compensation deadline.

The court accepted the next stage was for Mrs Ford-Sagers to seek a certificate of inadequacy from the High Court.