Disgraced millionaire tipster Kevin Booth has been jailed for two years for a sex attack on his Brazilian au pair.

The maths teacher-turned successful racing entrepreneur has swapped his luxury Utley home -- complete with swimming pool and tennis Court -- for a prison cell, after a jury at Bradford Crown Court rejected his claims that the 27-year-old woman had consented to their sexual encounter.

The jury took just over an hour to find 41-year-old Booth guilty of indecently assaulting the au pair behind locked doors at his offices, in the grounds of Broughton Hall, near Skipton, in April last year.

But it was only after their verdict had been returned that it was revealed that the former proprietor of a private school in the North East had been given a suspended prison sentence in 1994 for "punishment" assaults on pupils with sticks or canes.

During Booth's five-day trial the jury heard how the au pair, who had answered an advert he had placed on the Internet, was taken to the offices of Isiris Racing Services just two days after arriving in this country.

She described how Booth gave her a list of rules and duties and also showed her a video in which he was seen to whip a naked woman on the buttocks with a riding crop.

The next day she again went to the offices, and after Booth's secretary had gone home he put on some music, closed the blinds and used her Portugese-English dictionary to try and get his victim to massage him.

During the terrifying encounter, Booth offered the woman money for sex and she told the jury that at one point she thought he was going to rape her.

She refused to take part in oral sex with him, but during the incident he indecently touched her breasts and private parts.

A few days later the woman sought help from Booth's secretary when she feared that he was going to "horse whip" her at the offices as punishment for refusing to have sex with him.

Booth denied any kind of sexual contact with the woman when he was arrested by police, but DNA tests later linked him to semen found on her T-shirt.

In court he claimed that the au pair had been flirting with him, but he had lied about the sexual encounter because he didn't want his current 20-year-old partner, Tammy, to find out.

After the jury's guilty verdict, Booth's barrister Timothy White said his racing business would inevitably collapse and he would have to use his savings to pay back clients who had invested money in it.

"He is not a man who will find the prison environment easy to bear -- exactly the opposite," he said.

"He will be a very vulnerable prisoner, and imprisonment will bear down very hard on him."

On Monday, Judge Peter Armstrong sentenced Booth, of Hollins Lane, Utley, to two years in prison and ordered him to pay the prosecution costs of £6,850.

He told the divorcee, who has three children from a previous marriage and two to his current girlfriend, that his victim should have had an enjoyable experience working for his family and learning English.

"Far from having an enjoyable experience, you subjected her to a most unpleasant indecent assault," he said.

"The only thing that can be said in your favour is that you did not persist beyond that which she says occurred.

"You then on the Friday of that week threatened to carry out physical punishment on her, having failed to bribe her with money to come up with the sexual favours that you were after."

Judge Armstrong added: "It seems to me that you are a man of considerable intelligence and considerable wealth, and thought that your intelligence and wealth were sufficient to overcome her will and ensure that she did not tell anyone about this.

"You lied through your teeth to the police and, although that doesn't increase the sentence and the fact that you had a trial and she had to relive the ordeal in court again does not increase the sentence which I have to pass, it means there are no mitigating features from those angles at all."

Judge Armstrong added that a substantial sentence was necessary, not only to deter Booth from committing such offences again, but also to deter others who might think that the Internet was an easy way to get au pairs on which to "slake their lust".