Maccaba, who is London-based but originally from Glenageary, Dublin, already paid £1.7m earlier this year to lawyers for Dayan Yisroel Lichtenstein, the rabbi who successfully defended claims that he had called Maccaba an adulterer.

A further £100,000 in interest was sought by Dayan Lichtenstein's legal team but Maccaba has questioned whether interest payments are permitted under Jewish law and asked a religious court to adjudicate.

The rabbinical court, based in Tel Aviv, has since instructed Dayan Lichtenstein to order his lawyers to cease the recovery of the interest payments.

While the Israeli rabbinical court carries no weight within the British legal system, it has the power to impose sanctions on the cleric that may affect the functioning of his duties.

A resolution of this latest twist in the long-running story is expected to be protracted.

Maccaba is under increasing pressure in the UK courts and was last week hit with an order to pay £200,000 to Dayan Lichtenstein's lawyer, David Price, arising from the original trial.

The two-month court battle between Maccaba and Dayan Lichtenstein in 2004 was the longest slander trial in the English courts to date. The cleric's side of the story was accepted by a significant majority of the jury.

Dayan Lichtenstein denied that he had called Maccaba an adulterer but he did say that he believed the businessman had sexually harassed a married Jewish teacher, 36-yearold Natalie Attar.

Maccaba allegedly offered Attar's husband $1m dollars to buy his wife, so he could marry her himself. He had developed an "obsessive and selfish infatuation for her, " it was claimed by the defence.

Natalie Attar said she complained to the cleric about alleged harassment by Maccaba but the businessman claimed that Dayan Lichtenstein had spread the most heinous slanders possible in the Orthodox community, saying that he had committed adultery with a married Jewish woman.

Dayan Lichtenstein told the jury:

"I believed her then, and I believe her now." He had never said that Maccaba was an adulterer. That was not Attar's allegation, and, in the Orthodox community such an accusation would have besmirched her reputation far more than Maccaba's, he said.

Maccaba studied business management and economics at University College Dublin before taking a masters at the London School of Economics. He is a former economist for the Confederation of Irish Industry.

In 1989 he founded Cognotec, an international company producing internet foreign exchange banking software, and rapidly became a millionaire. Twice married and a father of six, he converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism in 1990.