February 6, 2001 12:02: A CHARITY is trying to shut down the website of a former employee claiming he has used its name illegally.

Paul Darke, 39, who is originally from Hayes, says Cheshire Homes is trying to stop him revealing what he says is the truth about its treatment of disabled people.

The global charity, which runs a home in Elmers End Road, Bromley, spent thousands of pounds for the rights to use most web address permutations of their name, including leonardcheshire.com, leonardcheshire.co.uk and leonardcheshire.org

But wheelchair-user Dr Darke, from Wolverhampton, was amazed when he found out they had overlooked the domain name of www.leonard-cheshire.com, so he snapped it up at £207.

The dispute will be arbitrated by the World Intellectual Property organisation, based in Geneva, and a result is expected in March.

Mr Darke, who suffers from spina bifida and hydrocephalus, describes the site as a work of interventionist art dedicated to raise money for a memorial to the £250,000 disabled people who died in Nazi Germany.

He said: This is not a publicity stunt and I am genuinely trying to get people to listen.

Cheshire Homes is a large money-making operation and that money should be spent on making disabled people independent and not putting them in long-term residential care.

He added: Of the 6,000 people who work at the charity, only about 20 of them are disabled, which is pitifully low.

A spokesman for Cheshire Homes said: Dr Darke is using our name in bad faith with an intention to mislead people about Leonard Cheshire homes.

He can air his views but we feel he is going about it in the wrong way and we are happy for him to use any other domain name.

We work with 15,000 disabled people in the UK and only 2,000 of those are in residential care so his ideas are just nonsense.