GEORGE Reynolds' plans to sell off his chipboard business will come as a bitter blow to the 180 staff who work there.

The exuberant chairman of Darlington Football Club had once said he would pass the business to his workforce.

But instead, he has chosen to sell it to Vertex Panel Products, of Bolton, Lancashire.

Little is known about the proposed new owners, only that it has pledged to keep on the entire workforce

The colourful character has chosen to sell the business to devote more time to taking the Quakers into the Premiership, and completing the club's new stadium.

To that end he plans to keep his engineering business in Coundon, to carry out work for the £15m stadium he is building in Neasham Road, Darlington.

He is also keeping a company building kitchen units, next to the Direct Worktops business he sold to US business Wilsonart for £43m in 1998. And he will carry on developing a £5m dock development in Wallsend with Wolsingham businessman Billy Morgan, as well as a manufacturing plant for animal bedding.

Last May, Mr Reynolds was left counting the cost when that facility was hit by a fire, costing him an estimated £200,000.

Seven years earlier, an electrical fault at the Direct Worktops plant in Shildon, left the entrepreneur with a bill for £21m. He was insured for just £7m at the time and faced rebuilding the company from scratch.

The sale of the George Reynolds UK chipboard business is the latest twist in a colourful career for one of the UK's richest men. His is a real rags-to-riches story.

Born in 1936, he started life with no real education and a childhood riddled with deprivation.

These harsh beginnings led Mr Reynolds into a life of petty crime, before graduating into safe-blowing which landed him a four-year jail term in Kirkham Open Prison, from where he was released in 1964.

On his release, Mr Reynolds vowed never to return, and embarked on a startling rehabilitation. Despite regretting his life of crime in his younger days, Mr Reynolds is a strong believer that it was those difficult younger years that made him the brilliant businessman he is today. It also appears to have made him a generous one.

Twenty years after establishing Direct Worktops, he used the proceeds from its sale to pay off the mortgages of the staff who had helped him rebuild the business after the devastating fire that almost cost him everything.

He then used the remaining cash to set up the business he has just sold, to manufacture worktops which were delivered from the plant across the UK and the world.

Despite the sale of George Reynolds UK to focus on Darlington Football Club, it probably won't be long before Mr Reynolds is back at the coalface, turning a small business into a global target for takeover.

But it isn't money that motivates him. He is on record as saying: "I get my kicks from making a company successful and proving others wrong."

It seems that all that Mr Reynolds touches turns to gold. He now has his eyes on taking Darlington Football Club into the Premiership.