A DISGRACED accountant will serve extra time behind bars after police found his hoard of indecent pictures of children in the internet cloud.

Brian Ridyard, 65, was already serving a five-year prison term for defrauding and stealing from many small businesses in North and East Yorkshire while doing their accounts.

Neil Coxon, prosecuting, said when police examined his computers as part of the fraud investigation, they found he had more than 19,000 indecent videos and photographs of children, some of them of the most serious form of sexual abuse.

He had collected them up until August 2017, despite a court putting him on a sex offender treatment programme in 2016 for similar offences involving far fewer images.

Ridyard’s solicitor advocate Mark Partridge said police had found the majority of the 19,000 images in the internet cloud and the former accountant couldn’t explain how they had got there.

“He accepts the difficulties and problems he has,” said Mr Partridge.

“The only explanation for revisiting this sort of material is that his wife died suddenly in February 2017. That threw everything in his life up in the air.”

Ridyard, formerly of Duna Way, Kirkbymoorside, pleaded guilty to 12 charges of possessing indecent images of children, one of having prohibited images and six of making indecent images.

At York Crown Court, he was jailed for a year, to be served after he finishes the five-year sentence he received in November 2017 at the same court.

He was also made subject to his second sexual harm prevention order, this time for 10 years, and must remain on the sex offenders’ register for another 10 years.

Mr Coxon said police found 440 videos and 283 photographs of the most serious category of abuse, 53 videos and 274 of the middle category and 55 videos and 18,790 images of the least serious category.

In 2015, police had found five images of the most serious category, eight of the middle category and 121 of the lowest category.

When he appeared before York Crown Court for those offences in January 2016, he was given a community order with a sex offenders treatment programme and his first sexual harm prevention order.