A night manager who separated damaged or counterfeit notes from good ones for the Bank of England was found guilty yesterday of stealing up to £2 million.

Earl Walker, 50, who worked for G4S Cash Services (UK) Ltd, lived in a council house in Hackney, East London, but drove a £34,000 Mercedes and regularly took flights to Jamaica and Toronto, where he bought a three-storey house.

He spent thousands of pounds each month on a quantity of bank and credit cards which he then paid off in cash.

Every room in his small council house had a flat-screen television and all the latest computer games. He spent tens of thousands of pounds converting the basement of his Toronto home, which he bought in 2005, into a games room with a snooker table and cinema screen.

When detectives searched his office they found a shoe box containing more than £1,000 in genuine £20 notes and officers uncovered £37,000 in sterling and quantities of Canadian and Jamaican dollars at his flat.

The court was told how Walker exploited loopholes in the sorting system, stealing no more than £1,000 at a time .

He would “dip in and out” of the sorting process that involved weeding out the damaged, poor quality or forged notes which had comefrom high street banks and other financial institutions, from the good ones that were suitable to be put back into ATM machines.

The bad notes would be bundled up separately from the good ones before being returned to the Bank of England for destruction.

During the process Walker would put bad notes into bundles of good notes to make sure the weight was correct.

Walker also knew that when large sums of money are counted by two people there is a margin of error and he knew what that was, taking a little out of the process each time.

Walker, who claimed to have left the Jamaican police force because it was corrupt, was found guilty at Kingston Crown Court of theft, possessing criminal property, transferring criminal property, acquiring criminal property and removing criminal property from England and Wales. He was found not guilty one count of possessing criminal property.

His wife, Barbara Walker, was found not guilty on all counts. Walker will be sentenced later this month.

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