He is best known as one of the fiercest dragons on BBC 2, but now it appears that Duncan Bannatyne is breathing fire off of the television too. The gym entrepreneur, who is worth an estimated £430 million, has graced our televisions since 2005 trading his investments for equity. Yet despite the Scotsman’s ability to crunch numbers, it appears that it is in fact his customer skills that may leave much to be desired.

Sunday 21^st April saw what appears to be fiery exchange occur on the Twitter between Bannatyne and one of his gym members, Funda Ozmus. It began with Ozmus sending a direct tweet to Bannatyne regarding her opinion on an alleged racist incident at his Grove Park health club. As Twitter has nearly 555,000,000 active accounts it is not unusual for members to send both thankful and irritated tweets to businesses. A simple search shows that the Bannatynes gym and spa frequently received their fair share of both. One of the tweets read “Your bar manager at #bannatynes gym Ingleby Barwick is seriously rude, just lost my buisness.” Even famous UK rapper Professor Green got in on the act tweeting back in 2011 “bannatynes stop texting me, I’m never coming back to your gym.”

It seems in this case Duncan decided to take direct action. A blast of words appeared to be fired between the two with Bannatyne saying he will take Osmuz to court for spreading lies about his business, it appears that she attempts to explain the alleged incident when Bannatyne tries to turn the conversation around onto her by saying she is being a racist. The Dragon ends his trail of messages by stating that “I hope you are not a member or want to continue as one.”

Osmuz later confirmed that her membership had been revoked with immediate effect. This clearly came as a shock to the fitness fanatic whose bio boasts an impress 62KG weight loss, which she herself admits began at her local Bannatynes club. In fact she spent so much time there that the health club recently used her story in the promotional material.

Bannatyne has since deleted his tweets, while Osmuz shared with her followers that she had received a gag order and had been threatened by court action for defamation.