A primary school’s parent governor in Essex has resigned after his local paper exposed his murky criminal past.

Basildon-based daily the Echo revealed that Richard Sheridan had failed to disclose two convictions for cigarette smuggling to the school’s board of governors.

He was jailed for a year in September 2004 for his involvement in smuggling 660,000 cigarettes into the UK and became a governor in February 2006 after failing to declare his conviction on a self-disclosure form.

He was given another 12-month sentence in June 2006 for a similar offence involving 1.2m fake cigarettes and returned to work for the school upon his release.

Despite the primary school introducing Criminal Record Bureau checks for all governors in 2007, Sheridan still wasn’t properly vetted and stayed in the role until the Echo’s exposé.

The story was the first part of a two-day special feature by investigations reporter Jon Austin which linked a local traveller site north of Basildon to large-scale cigarette smuggling.

Sheridan is the main spokesman campaigning to prevent his extended family being evicted by Basildon Council from the site and also president of the Gypsy Council charity, which is now investigating whether someone with such convictions can be so heavily involved in a charity.

Jon’s investigations found the gang Sheridan was involved with was believed to have smuggled in 67m cigarettes, evading about £9m in excise duty.

On day two of publication, Jon revealed that furniture had been used to smuggle huge amounts of cigarettes hidden inside.

Since 2006 Jon has been investigating the travellers’ trade in suspect fire hazard furniture imported from Poland which, he says, Essex Trading Standards appeared to have turned a blind eye to.

Last December he went undercover to buy a sofa from the site and it is this same furniture which was used to smuggle the cigarettes.

Within hours of the Echo hitting the streets, police and trading standards officers seized around 80 pieces of furniture which had been arriving unchecked at the site since 2001.

To cap off a busy period for the reporter, the Legal Service Commission ruled that a traveller family made a false claim for legal aid.

Its three-month inquiry was held after Jon revealed the family was receiving legal aid in a fight to save their illegal caravan pitch despite paying for a £230,000 five-bedroom house just down the road.

Jon said: “It was a busy few days, with months’ worth of work going to print and then a lot of reaction over a short space of time.

“There was the governor quitting, the legal aid. Trading standards had ignored the furniture issue for years and then all of a sudden made a big seizure. It just goes to show the local press can make a difference.”