Edinburgh Sheriff Court heard Baxter had 3,500 child porn pictures

He had started viewing obscene websites after winning a security contract to block staff at a large company from accessing pornography.

Edinburgh Sheriff Court was told Robert Baxter found as much as 60% of the storage space on the company's computers was taken up with pornography.

He had to view websites the material had been downloaded from, in order to prevent the company's staff from accessing them again.

But Baxter, 54, later went back to the same sites and started paying for pornographic images of children.

Disgusting

He later worked for European companies dealing with budgets of millions of euros, which included travelling.

Baxter took his laptop computer with him and continued to visit pornographic sites.

As part of Operation Ore, the anti-paedophile crackdown, he was caught after using a credit card.

Police raided his home in Barnton Court, Edinburgh, in January and seized 238 CDs along with his computer for inspection.

Sentencing him, Sheriff Andrew Lothian told Baxter his money had funded the "disgusting business" of child abuse.

"You had 3,500 images of children being abused. This abuse should never happen to anyone let alone defenceless children," the sheriff said.