A former executive at an international entertainment company has been spared jail after he admitted filming up women’s skirts using a hidden camera.

Andrew Macrae, a former vice-president of the ticketing company Live Nation, amassed almost 50,000 images of strangers for his sexual gratification.

Macrae was caught when an off-duty police officer noticed a pen-shaped camera protruding from a laptop bag as he placed it between a woman’s legs on a platform at Clapham Junction station in London on 19 July last year. When the officer confronted him on the train to Waterloo, he admitted the pen was a camera.

In a search of his home in Redhill, Surrey, a hard drive was found that contained secretly taken images dating back to January 2013. The images were taken on public transport, in Macrae’s home and at a neighbour’s address, and also featured Macrae wearing some victims’ underwear.

It emerged that the married father of one had installed a camera in the guest bedroom of his home to film his wife’s friends when they stayed over. He also filmed through his neighbour’s window while she was undergoing a waxing treatment and secretly entered her house using a spare key to photograph himself in her underwear.

Macrae, 43, further revealed he had filmed a colleague during a brief meeting and taken a pair of her underwear from her gym bag and taken pictures of them laid out on his desk.

He admitted seven counts of voyeurism for the purposes of sexual gratification and one count of outraging public decency at a previous hearing, and was sentenced at Inner London crown court.

He told officers he was “disgusted” with himself, saying he was under financial pressure and his wife was receiving counselling, while a psychiatrist diagnosed him with traits of Asperger syndrome, as well as an acute reaction to stress and features of sex addiction.

Sentencing him to 20 months imprisonment suspended for two years, the judge, Jeremy Donne QC, said: “This was undoubtedly a sophisticated, organised, planned and long-running campaign of voyeurism, albeit sporadically. These offences are rightly regarded with revulsion by the public in general and women in particular.

“Women will undoubtedly feel a need to be protected from such behaviour by the knowledge that the courts will deal with such offenders severely, and men will thereby be deterred from committing such offences.

“On the other hand, you suffer from an illness that can be treated and you have submitted to treatment.”

Macrae was barred from owning any covert recording device and any device capable of storing images unless it was made available on request to the police for the next 10 years.