An oil trader sacked from his high-pressure job at one of the world’s biggest companies after they claimed he was too hungover to attend meetings, says he was a scapegoat for huge losses.

Father-of-three Andrew Kearns, of Marshall Road, Rainham, is taking on Glencore UK, where he worked from January 2009 to October 2010.

Giving evidence in court he claimed: “The culture in this organisation is that you can do what you like as long as you make money.”

The 37-year-old, who coaches Rainham 84 under-eights at weekends, was dismissed for alleged serious misconduct after a business trip to Singapore in which he was found to be in “no fit state after a heavy night the evening before”.

Now he wants damages for wrongful dismissal.

Mr Kearns said the picture painted of him in court as an alcoholic who couldn’t control his drinking is false.

It wasn’t “wanton hedonism” that saw him remain out until the early hours; he was asked to take colleagues out for drinks, a perfectly normal part of his job.

Mr Kearns said: “I was only there for two days, I was jetlagged.

"It wasn’t me painting the town red at 4am; it was 8pm on my body clock and I’d been awake since 2am.”

He denied there were any business meetings later that day which required his attendance.

The former St John Fisher pupil does accept he had been drinking – six to eight 330ml bottles of beer over the course of eight hours – but insists he wasn’t drunk.

Glencore, which is contesting the action at the High Court in London, claims he failed to attend critical meetings in the morning, at lunchtime and in the afternoon of October 11 in what was the latest in a string of similar incidents.

Efforts were made to contact him and when they did manage to get a hold of Mr Kearns, his explanation was that he didn’t know there were any meetings, the court heard.

Mr Kearns had promised there would be no repeat and had been offered support for alcohol-related issues, the commodities and mining company maintains.

This justified summary dismissal without prior warning, according to them.

In papers before the court, Glencore’s counsel Jonathan Cohen defended the company’s actions.

“I was only there for two days. I was jetlagged" - Andrew Kearns

He said: “This is an industry where a mistaken decimal point might result in losses of a very substantial nature.

"An employer cannot be expected to allow an employee who allows himself to become inappropriately inebriated to remain in the workplace.”

Mr Kearns was handed a signing-on bonus equivalent to £202,000 in today’s rates when he joined the multi-national company, which had a net income of more than £1 billion for the first half of 2013.

He was on an annual salary of £140,000 plus other benefits – a far cry from his first job at Hoo shipbuilding firm RJ Lapthorn.

It was ruled last week that Mr Kearns could not claim back shares worth more than £600,000.

The hearing continues.