As the head of Britain’s most successful IVF clinic, Dr Mohamed Taranissi makes plenty of babies. He also makes plenty of money. The 52-year-old is Britain’s wealthiest doctor, valued at £38 million. Last night Panorama purported to show exactly how he has accumulated it: by offering expensive, unproven treatment to women who may not need it. “It makes you weep for the medical profession,” said Lord Winston, the fertility specialist and television presenter.

A 26-year-old undercover reporter is filmed being advised by a junior doctor at Taranissi’s Assisted Reproductive and Gynaecology Centre to have treatment costing up to £10,000, despite having no history of fertility problems. Patients were also being seen at his other London clinic, the Reproductive Genetics Institute (RGI), even though its licence has been revoked by the fertility watchdog, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). Yesterday the HFEA was considering its response to the claims.

Taranissi, who has clocked up about 2,000 babies, claims that the secretly filmed footage was edited selectively, and that IVF was one of many options, including natural conception, discussed with the reporter. Regarding RGI’s licence, he and the HFEA are locked in a legal dispute and, in the meantime, he says he has been permitted to continue treatments there. He also claims that the unproven tests for which he has been criticised — such as immune testing of prospective parents — may be the secret of his year-on-year league-table success. The average success rate for IVF, defined as a live birth, is about 28 per cent per cycle for under-35s; for Taranissi, it is 54 per cent. However, his clinic has attracted the ire of the HFEA for topping the league for multiple births, which carry additional risks for both mother and child. When the HFEA warned patients last year that such clinics should be approached “with caution”, Taranissi told me that he felt victimised: “I see the hostility every day. I’m not overreacting. I know that there’s an agenda here.”

Taranissi trained as a gynaecologist and later switched to fertility treatment. Born in 1954 into a wealthy Egyptian family; his Muslim father was an army man with a property business. Taranissi still observes his faith.

Strangely, for a man so consumed with making happy families, he rarely sees his own two youngest children (he has four by two marriages). He works a 14-hour day, plus weekends, and shuns social activities — a merciless regime that reinforces his image as an outsider.

I wrote last year that “Taranissi’s bluntness, his wealth, his self-confessed lack of respect for the HFEA . . . have all come together to earn him a reputation as an abrasive maverick straining at the leash of regulation”. We will soon learn whether that leash has reached breaking point.