A Canning Town market trader who was jailed for selling counterfeit designer jewellery has had his sentence halved by appeal judges.

Pak Shing Lam, 47, of Churchill Road, was caught in August 2007 with dozens of fake items at Surrey Quays shopping centre, in Canada Water.

Of 40 items actually tested, trading standards officers found 36 to be counterfeit, bearing the names of designer brands such as Chanel, Tiffany and Louis Vuitton.

In February of this year, after he had earlier been convicted of nine counts of unauthorised use of a trademark, he was jailed for eight months at Inner London Crown Court.

But today, following an appeal by his lawyers, three senior judges slashed his “manifestly excessive” prison sentence to four months at the Court of Appeal.

Judge Nicholas Cooke QC, sitting with Lord Justice Pitchford and Mr Justice Wilkie, said trademark holders needed to be protected by the law, but Lam’s case was not the most serious of its kind.

“This does not appear to be a case in which the buying public were likely to have been deceived, nor was this offending on a large scale,” he said.