The Plumber faces prison for contempt

PAUL Davidson, the controversial entrepreneur known as The Plumber, will appear in court on Thursday to face contempt charges in the latest development in his long-running dispute with pipe fitting company Oystertec.

Davidson, 48, went voluntarily to a London police station on Friday after a judge issued a warrant following his non-appearance for court proceedings the previous week.

Davidson, who founded Oystertec, is expected to be be jailed as it is not the first time he has failed to appear in court.

The dispute relates to the ownership of a patent for a pipe fitting appliance, which was sold to Oystertec by Davidson. It is the latest twist in a series of court appearances for Davidson, who is fighting a £750,000 fine from the Financial Services Authority in an unrelated case.

His court appearance comes as City law firm Norton Rose launches proceedings to seize his luxury home in Prestbury, Cheshire, to cover an allegedly unpaid bill of £860,000 for work done between March 2003 and January this year.

In a writ filed at the High Court, Norton Rose alleges that Davidson calculated he had debts of £24m and assets of just £4m and proposed entering a voluntary bankruptcy arrangement on 31 August.

Davidson told Financial Mail on Sunday in June that he was worth 'between £60m and £65m' and complained about being forced to live on 'only £1,000 a week' after his assets were frozen by lawyers working for Oystertec, which is headed by Angus Monro.

Davidson owns six houses in England, plus a Spanish villa that takes ten minutes to walk from one end to the other, and a 100 foot yacht once owned by Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia.

He also drives a 40-seater Rave Bus, and 11 other cars, including a Bentley Arnage that goes from zero to 60mph in six seconds and is driven by John, his one-legged chauffeur.

He claims the freezing order cost him 'hundreds of millions of pounds' after he was forced to sell six developments, including a hotel conversion in north Wales and an industrial estate and two office blocks in Macclesfield, Cheshire.

Norton Rose proposes selling Davidson's house for 'not less than £1.5m' to cover the bills run up when the law firm acted for him against the FSA, which fined him in relation to a £5m spread bet in biotech company Cyprotex. It has won the right to claim £860,276.33 and interest of £89.93 a day.

Davidson, who lives in the house with his wife Karen and two children, also used it as security for a £937,000 bank loan that was due to be repaid last month. He also borrowed £300,000 from a friend to buy the house. The friend now wants repayment.

The FSA said the spread bet helped the successful flotation of Cyprotex by pushing up the share price and this was market abuse.

Davidson, who claims to be ignorant of the bet, says he was not even interviewed before being fined.

His appeal against the fine, for which he now receives legal aid, was recently postponed indefinitely. It followed the abandonment of an earlier appeal after it emerged that Christopher Fitzgerald, former chair of the FSA committee that decides punishment for wrongdoing, had spoken privately to a member of the tribunal hearing the case.

Fitzgerald subsequently resigned.