A woman spent nearly £1,000 of her dying father’s care home fees to buy tickets for a Robbie Williams concert in Paris.

Sarah Ferguson went on to empty her dad’s bank account and then ran up a £3,000 debt on his credit card.

A judge told her, ”You were in a particular position of trust - a position of trust which you abused. You should be thoroughly ashamed of what you did.”

But he suspended a four-month jail sentence for two years after hearing that she is repaying the money - out of cash her dad had left her in his will.

Liverpool Crown Court heard that Ferguson, 50, and her brother Neil Barnes were granted control over 79-year-old James Barnes’ finances in 2011.

He later moved into a care home in Oxton, where he died on February 13, 2015.

His pension from Vauxhall Motors was paid into a bank account, intended to cover his care costs and expenses, said Edmund Haygarth, prosecuting.

“On October 10, 2014, it was more than £7,395 in credit. By the end of the year it was £2,475 overdrawn. The reason for that is because Sarah Ferguson had been spending that money."

Ferguson, of Mount Park, Bebington, stole £930 in November 2014 to buy two tickets to see the pop star. He performed in France in March 2015 - but bizarrely Ferguson did not go to the show.

She was confronted by her brother after he noticed payments "which he thought had no relevance to his father's welfare”.

“She admitted spending the money but said she would settle the debt and any outstanding fees. Her brother expected that would be the end of the matter, but sadly she continued to spend his money."

Ferguson withdrew £450 in cash between December 11 and 12 and then used her dad's credit card until January 15, 2015 when her brother reported her to the police.

Ferguson observed that her father would have given her “the shirt off his back."

"She then accepted it was both legally and morally wrong that she had not paid her father's care home fees.”

Ferguson pleaded guilty to three charges of theft involving £4,000.

Mr Haygarth said that nine other allegations of theft had been dropped as she is paying back the money out of the inheritance her dad left her.

Jeremy Hawthorne, defending, said jobless Ferguson, who has no previous convictions, had been living in Mr Barnes' house and looked after him before visiting him regularly at the care home.

Ferguson, diagnosed as bipolar, spent the money on herself and her children and said ”things simply got out of control".

He added, "She never went to the concert. She has no explanation as to why she bought the tickets."

The judge, Recorder David Turner, QC, told her, "You helped yourself to over £7,000 - some of it legitimate, some of it not - out of the bank account, and when that could no longer be used, you helped yourself to the credit card.”

He added that her father had been a hard working man and she had accepted that he would have been “mortified” at her actions.