Former leading auditor jailed in child porn case

A FORMER public spending auditor who oversaw how £20bn of taxpayers' money was spent has been jailed for eight months for downloading pictures of child sex abuse.

Jeremy Colman, 62, who stood down from his 170,000-a-year post as Auditor General for Wales in February, admitted making and possessing more than 170 indecent images, some of which were at level four on a scale of one to five, where five is the most serious.

Cardiff Crown Court heard that in January he told officials at the Wales Audit Office, where he had been in charge for almost five years, he had accessed social networking websites on his office computer. He said he had sexual conversations, received unsolicited photographs and sent a naked picture of himself to someone he met online. He was advised to take sick leave and an investigation began.

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The following month police were called in and a search warrant was executed at one of Colman's two offices at the Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay, part of the National Assembly for Wales. Police recovered images from a cache of deleted items on his computer. When they seized computers at Colman's South Wales home, all of the hard drives were missing.

Roger Griffiths, prosecuting, said images were loaded on to a memory stick and taken into the Pierhead Building. He also used Google to search for material on the internet.

Colman admitted 14 offences of possessing and making images of children earlier this month.

Wendy Hewitt, mitigating, said his use of social networking sites had quickly "spiralled out of its proper usage".

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