A financial director who funded a luxury lifestyle by fiddling the finances of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) to the tune of £648,000 has been jailed for four years.

Cameron Poole, 35, splashed his cash on a £900,000 house in Herne Hill, exotic holidays around the world and artworks worth tens of thousands of pounds during the three-year fraud spree while he was the the LPO’s financial director.

The Australian is married to former Gipsy Hill councillor Suzanne Poole, with whom he has three children, but who left him after the fraud was discovered in November last year.

The court was told it was estimated as a result of the fraud the LPO lost £2.3m in arts council grants, legal fees and missing interest payments.

It was only after he left his £60,000-a-year post that Poole’s bosses found there was a huge hole in the accounts – where he had been siphoning off cash, using his financial expertise to cover his tracks.

Prosecutor David Levy said Poole, employed at the LPO from January 2004, was “regarded as a safe pair of hands, a reliable and well-liked individual”.

Mr Poole said he started to steal the cash after the birth of his first child with Mrs Poole, as he wanted them to move to a bigger house, the court was told.

Poole, who has been working as a waiter, has been “wiped out” attempting to pay off the high court settlement, the court was told, raising £215,000 from the sale of the home, £43,000 from selling paintings and thousands more by auctioning off his Rolex watch and an expensive diamond necklace.

Sentencing him, Judge Deborah Taylor said: “These were serious offences.

“You were in a position of the utmost trust, and in that position you must have been aware of the potential danger and damage to the orchestra that you taking this money for your own personal gain could have had.”

Mrs Poole has been working as a part-time music teacher at Bishop Thomas Grant School in Streatham, and living with her children in a property owned by her place of worship, Christ Church in Gipsy Hill.