Amy Winehouse’s husband paid £200,000 of his wife’s money to a pub landlord he had previously beaten up, to persuade the man not to appear in court, it was claimed yesterday.

Despite suffering a fractured cheekbone in the June 2006 assault by Blake Fielder-Civil and Michael Brown, James King was willing to accept the payoff, the jury at Snaresbrook Crown Court, in East London, was told.

Mr King, 36, of Risley, Derbyshire, struck a deal to withdraw his statement and “effectively throw the [court] case and not turn up”, Sean Larkin, for the prosecution, said.

Anthony Kelly and James Kennedy acted as middlemen who helped to broker the deal. Their role was also to “babysit” Mr King, by accompanying him abroad when the trial was due to start, the court was told.

But the plot was exposed after the middlemen, aware that Fielder-Civil was newsworthy because of his marriage to Winehouse, contacted the Daily Mirror in October 2007. They then tried to sell CCTV images of the attack outside a pub in Hoxton, East London, but boasted to Stephen Moyes, a Mirror journalist, that there was an “even bigger story”.

Mr Moyes told the court: “He [Kelly] said that the victim of the assault, James King, was to be taken out of the country and paid some money so that it [the trial] would not happen. He was to be paid £200,000.”

When Mr Moyes asked Kelly if Winehouse knew about the deal, he was told: “Who do you think is paying for it?” Mr Moyes told the jury that the men he met “appeared to be motivated by money”.

The assault in June 2006 may have been a revenge attack because, for “whatever reason”, there was a grievance between Brown and Mr King, Mr Larkin explained.

At around closing time Fielder-Civil and Brown were seen to pounce on Mr King, kicking him to the ground and inflicting serious injury. The attack was caught on a security camera. The jury was told that the plotters had been in contact with each other by phone, text and in person several times before Mr King made his taped withdrawal statement in November 2007.

Mr King told police later that he had been the victim of two attacks within weeks in the summer of 2006. The first was the incident of GBH in June and the second in July when he was injured on the arm and neck.

He then moved to East Sussex where two “heavy-looking men” came to his home and threatened him. On a separate occasion two men had threatened him and insisted that he had to withdraw his statement, he claimed.

Mr King told the court: “I was told I would need to write a withdrawal of my statement which would need to be videoed. I was told that I would have to say that I was under duress — which was as far from the truth as possible.

“Apparently the video was for Amy Winehouse. It seems they were extorting her for money to make this go away.”

There is no evidence to suggest that the singer was part of the plot.

Mr Larkin said: “On November 7, Amy Winehouse’s manager asked her bank for £8,000, which was withdrawn on November 8. The manager asked for more cash and Winehouse asked for £5,000, which she collected from the office in person.

“That may well accord with the £5,000 he [Kelly] wanted up front, which he later told Stephen Moyes he had received.”

Detectives investigated the second alleged attack against Mr King but three doctors who examined his injuries said that they “appeared to be self-inflicted,” Mr Larkin reported.

Mr King refused to give his fingerprints and only his DNA was found on the blade alleged to have been used in the attack. The CCTV cameras pointing at the scene had been switched off, the court was told. Mr King denies conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Fielder-Civil, 26, of Camden, North London, has pleaded guilty to inflicting grievous bodily harm on Mr King and to perverting the course of justice. Brown, of Carshalton, Surrey, has pleaded guilty to the same offences.

Kelly, 25, of Chalk Farm, North London and Kennedy, 19, of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, have pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice. All are to be sentenced at a later date.

The hearing was adjourned.

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