THE DIRECTOR of a hearing aid company, struck off and handed a £30,000 legal costs bill after it was discovered he was viewing porn on a computer used for testing customers' ears, has launched a High Court fight to salvage his career.

Jason Lee Saunders, the director and part owner of Eastbourne Specsavers Hearcare Ltd, was discovered in April 2007 to have viewed 15 pornographic images, on the same work computer that he used to carry out hearing tests on clients, his barrister, Jamie Carpenter, told London's High Court today.

Mr Saunders was additionally found to have posted a naked picture of himself on the work PC, which was also used to program hearing aids, the barrister added.

A police investigation was mounted, though no prosecution followed, and Mr Saunders, of Compton Street, Eastbourne, resigned from his job soon afterwards, Mrs Justice Nicola Davies, was told.

He was struck of the list of registered dispensers of hearing aids by the Hearing Aid Council on February 9 this year, and ordered to pay 30,000 in legal costs.

This week his lawyers asked Mrs Justice Davies to overturn both the council's decision to erase his name from the the register and the huge costs bill.

Mr Carpenter told the court that Mr Saunders had received the porn pics in unsolicited emails via a social networking site which he had been accessing on the work computer.

He stored then in a file, which he named "Dirty", before erasing them in 2006.

But thumbnails of the images had, unbeknown to him, been stored in a different part of the computer, and were discovered by another worker more than a year after Mr Saunders thought he had deleted them.

The Hearing Aid Council subsequently struck off Mr Saunders, having found that he had "fallen below the standard of conduct required" for his position.

Mr Carpenter today argued that the sanction of erasure was "disproportionate" and the costs order "excessive" in the circumstances.

"The committee did not say what aspect of Mr Saunders' overall conduct was fundamentally incompatible with his practice as a hearing aid dispenser.

"They certainly didn't conclude that he posed any risk of harm to his patients," the barrister said.

"The images themselves were not illegal and there were relatively few of them. The question of professional misconduct only arose because of his use of a work computer.

"The committee gave insufficient weight to the fact that he had deleted the images a year before discovery, and the fact that he had already lost his job and livelihood," Mr Carpenter added.

He said that Mr Saunders had not worked for two years leading up to the hearing and had seen his doctor for anti-depressants due to the stress of the case.

Mrs Justice Davies reserved her judgement, following a half day hearing, to be given at a later date, yet to be set.