A 43-YEAR-OLD man has been remanded in custody after a jury convicted him of turning a cottage near Coleford into a cannabis factory.

Police who raided Pingry House, found six rooms packed with 1,015 cannabis plants capable of producing £250,000 worth of the drug.

Mark Holliday, of Rumney, Cardiff, denied conspiring with three other men between May 2007 and November 2008 to produce cannabis in the house, which he was renting from a farmer.

But after a four-day trial the jury at Gloucester Crown Court convicted him and he was remanded in custody to await sentence together with the other three men on a date to be fixed.

The other defendants, who have admitted the offence, are Ian Maclellan, 37, of Newport, Gwent, Carl Pycock, 35, of Newport, and Robert Whitaker, 37, of Harrogate.

Before adjourning the case today Judge Jamie Tabor QC was told that the prosecution had doubts about the real identity of Holliday.

He had been in possession of papers in the name of Mark Smith when arrested and claimed he had changed his name by deed poll but checks had so far failed to verify either name, said Mr Giles Nelson, prosecuting.

Judge Tabor asked for further checks to be made. He also said that in view of Whitaker giving evidence to the jury in support of Holliday which had clearly not been believed he was going to send the papers to the Director of Public Prosecutions. During the trial the jury heard that the cannabis factory was discovered after a man who called at Coleford Police Station with his car insurance documents stank so much of the drug that the desk clerk felt sick.

That man was Pycock, who gave the cottage near Coleford as his address.

Police decided to raid the house a few days later and found the full-scale cannabis growing operation in progress. The property had been let out on a short tenancy on June 15 2007 to Holliday and his girlfriend Leah Mitchell.

"Police found a very sophisticated system for growing cannabis plants in nearly all the rooms," said trial prosecutor Simon Burns.

The electricity meter had been by-passed to avoid paying the £4,000 cost of heating the plants, he said.

Although Holliday was not physically present at the property the police found six of his fingerprints on pages of a diary in the house and his dog was there, Mr Burns said.

He told the jury: "The police recovered 1,015 plants and £2,808 in cash. The utilities for the house – electricity, council tax, BT landline – were all in Mr Holliday's name."

A mobile phone used by Holliday was also found in the cottage and on it were texts relating to growing plants, said Mr Burns.

He told the jury the cannabis plants in the house would have yielded 88 kilos of the bush drug worth between £168,000 and £272,000.

The prosecution viewed Holliday as a senior organiser in the growing plot, he told the jury. In evidence Holliday claimed that he had stopped living at the property.