East Anglian brewer Greene King has apologised and launched an internal investigation after the bank details of more than 2,000 employees were emailed across its pub network.

The company, which has its headquarters in Bury St Edmunds, says the files - which included bank account and sort code details - have been deleted from pub computers since the emails were discovered last Thursday.

They had come from the company's payroll department in Suffolk and were sent to explain that HMRC had miscalculated tax codes for some staff.

All affected employees were notified the next day by their managers and offered a one-year subscription to an identity protection monitoring service.

It is understood that no other personal information, like addresses or national insurance numbers, were included in the files.

A spokesman for Greene King, which is a member of the EADT/EDP Top100, said: 'Last Thursday we discovered the bank account number and sort code details for just over 2,000 of our 44,000 team members were emailed in error to a number of our pubs earlier in the evening as part of a communication about an HMRC tax code error.

'The file did not contain any other personal information. As soon as we were made aware of the error we took immediate action and deleted the email from inboxes.

'We have also carried out further IT checks to ensure the file is deleted from all pub computers and are in the process of contacting everyone affected.'

The spokesman added: 'We apologise unreservedly to all our team members who have been affected by this and we are doing all we can to support them.

'We are committed to putting this right as soon as possible; a full investigation is already under way and lessons will be learned to prevent a reoccurrence.'