PENSIONER porn king Paul Raymond revealed a different set of figures last week, showing he had taken a £6m pay cut in his latest accounts filed at Companies House.

The drop in earnings is one of the biggest in Britain this year and was taken despite the apparent good health of the Paul Raymond Organisation. Profits rose to £27m from £21m on flat sales of £42.9m. Raymond took home £1.5m, a sharp drop from the £7.6m he paid himself the previous year.

He also took a £2m dividend, a figure which remained unchanged from 2000.

Raymond, 76, started life washing dishes for £1 a week in the 1950s before opening the Raymond Revue Bar in 1958 and creating a soft-porn empire.

He generates a large income from rents on commercial property in Soho, and owns freeholds on 60 of Soho’s 87 acres, plus 20 acres in Notting Hill, Kensington and Chelsea.

His property company, Soho Estates, has assets which have been estimated as worth as much as £350m, but in the accounts they are conservatively estimated at £160m, up £40m from the previous year.

Raymond’s figures were filed too late for his salary package to be included in The Sunday Times Pay List. His core business is his high-end soft-porn magazines, which include Club International and Mayfair.

Paul Raymond Publications owns eight of the 10 best-selling adult titles in Britain and is valued at more than £100m.

The latest accounts, which ended in December 2001, show cash in the bank of £16m, a fall from £36m the previous year.

Management fees and interest of £92,501 and £133,294 were charged to Ilona House Securities, a company controlled by family trusts of Paul Raymond. The profit-and-loss account showed net worth at year- end of £171m.

Raymond is no longer on the board of the business, having passed the reins over to his nephew, Mark Quinn, managing director and a former GP who had practised in Accrington, Lancashire, for most of the past 20 years. Raymond’s daughter, Debbie, 36, died of a drug overdose in 1992 and his son, Howard, has no involvement in the business.