Vance Miller has featured in headline news stories many times, even before the latest sensational reports covering a pre-dawn Maple Mill police raid, but not always because campaigning newspaper reporters were taking another crack at running down his 'cheaper than chipboard' home kitchens supply business.

His two houses were fire-bombed by arsonists, gunmen threatened employees at his kitchens company, and a graffiti gang painted his name in public warnings on buildings and homes in nightly attacks that spread across north Lancashire.

It began in September, when press photographers found Vance Miller standing grim-faced outside the blackened shell of his country house in Yorkshire, fire-bombed whilst he was away on a camping trip with his son, and as newspaper business page writers examined sensational reports that said he was responsible for the downfall of MFI - the UK retail furniture giant.

On September 22nd, MFI announced it was giving away its loss making retail operations to private equity group Merchant Equity Partners and paying them 65 million pounds to take the stores off their hands. MEP were to invest in the retail outlets to keep them running and MFI hoped to continue supplying the stores with kitchens.

MFI chief executive Matthew Ingle blamed changing customer demand for the business downturn.

Vance Miller says it was the "unbeatable price" of the kitchens he imports from China and Poland at his Maple Mill headquarters in Oldham, near Manchester, that forced MFI to make such a costly retreat from the retail business.

He does not believe that anyone connected with MFI was responsible for the attack on his Yorkshire home, or a later fire-bombing raid on his town house near Bury, Lancashire.

But MFI retail sales fell by more than 25 per cent in the first six months of 2006 and it is the variously-named kitchen firms based in Oldham, supplied by Vance Miller’s import delivery systems, that are reckoned to have removed MFI from its top spot in the British market, where the company vied for position with nationwide chain stores B&Q and Magnet.

As well as competing directly with MFI, B&Q and Magnet, with dramatically lower prices for the flat-pack kitchen furniture that customers assemble themselves, Vance Miller says he also supplies the kitchens that some of the big-name retailers sell, sourcing millions of components in the remotest parts of China for the big British stores.

"People don't know it, but when they buy a new kitchen from most of the big suppliers, they will usually be buying something I tracked down in the far corners of China. They may not know it. But they are still buying my kitchens".

Now a sole trader, the buccaneering owner of the largest of the remaining traditional mill premises in northern England was described in a BBC TV television documentary as the rogue of kitchen retailing.
A patchy trading record led several newspapers to campaign against him. But Miller recovered to set new records with his imports, advertised on road trailers parked in fields along the motorway network, and says that in spite of "exaggerated" reporting of complaints by "a tiny minority" of customers, the quality of his cut-price kitchens is demonstrably good enough to have humbled the MFI business, once valued at a billion pounds.

"You can't get quality materials and workmanship at low prices from behind a desk. Do you think that the bosses of my competitors would do what I do? Would they go up into the valleys in China where no European has been seen for fifty years, talk to the locals, find out what they can make, then give them the money to produce it and ship it to Britain?

"I am sometimes the first outsider these workers have ever seen. Do you think the boss of MFI, who has lost millions of pounds of shareholders' money, would do what I do to keep prices down? Live rough for weeks on end, buying direct from the men who cut the granite?.

"I go to Mongolia and right up into Tibet. They put banners up when I get to some of these places. I also buy in Poland, Turkey, Spain, Italy, South Africa, Germany, Dubai and India.

"There might be someone in Britain who knows more about granite tops than me. There could be someone who knows more about woodwork. There must be someone who knows more about bathroom fittings. But, take my word for it, no-one knows more about the complete kitchen and bathroom business than Vance Miller."

But the newspapers that reported MFI’s struggle with falling market share have also reported Vance Miller’s own problems since his two houses were firebombed.

Reporting the house fires, The People newspaper also repeated press stories from earlier years and reprinted a trade flyer in which Vance had self-mockingly referred to himself as The Kitchen Gangster.

"That's the trouble", said Miller. "Whenever my name is mentioned, the old stories start again".

West Yorkshire police are still hunting the arsonists who destroyed his converted Yorkshire farmhouse, Great Manshead Farm near Ripponden, and Lancashire police have investigated a petrol bomb attack on his town house home in the former cemetery gatehouse at Ramsbottom, Greater Manchester. Click Here to Continue