A MORRISONS employee who lost the supermarket group more than £2 million with a vengeful data leak is fighting a compensation claim to seize up to £450,000 from him.

Andrew Skelton was brought back to Bradford Crown Court yesterday from the prison where he is serving eight years for a "cold and calculated" fraud that affected 100,000 of his colleagues.

Skelton, 43, of Liverpool, was a senior internal IT auditor at the Bradford-based company when he leaked sensitive payroll data on to a file sharing website and posted it to the Telegraph & Argus and two national newspapers.

He wanted to cause Morrisons financial loss and to damage its reputation after he was disciplined for using its mail room to send a legal high to an Ebay customer.

Skelton, who wore a grey jumper and blue shirt for the compensation case, sat in the dock as Katherine Robinson, barrister for the Crown, said the estimated loss to Morrisons from his criminality was £2.25 million.

While the Crown accepted that Skelton "had not got anything like that" it was believed his assets amounted to at least £400,000 from property and investments.

Miss Robinson said Morrisons wanted "a reasonable amount" back.

Skelton had inherited a property from his late father, the court was told.

But Christopher Convey, barrister for Skelton, said the compensation hearing should be held in a civil court.

It was a complex case and Morrisons had not given a detailed enough breakdown of its losses.

"Anyone can put forward a figure and it can stack up very quickly," Mr Convey said.

He demanded further evidence of the supermarket group's losses and not "a headline figure."

"The criminal court doesn't have the tools for an evidential examination of the figures," he said.

But the Recorder of Bradford, Judge Roger Thomas QC, who jailed Skelton in July, said: "The loss must at least be in the sort of amounts that he has available to him."

Miss Robinson said that just one invoice submitted by Morrisons was "well in excess" of anything Skelton could raise.

Last month, it was revealed that more than 2,000 Morrisons staff are to sue the supermarket for damages after the data leak. Lawyers said they did not yet know the size of a total claim.

Judge Thomas adjourned the hearing until December 16 to "get more flesh on the bones" of Morrisons' claimed losses and to obtain more information about Skelton's financial affairs.