The company set up by Jeremy Clarkson made a profit of half a million pounds last year despite his departure from Top Gear.

Accounts for his private company show that profits increased from £1.2m to £1.7m in the year ending May 2015, which includes his final months on Top Gear. £456,804 was paid out to an undisclosed creditor during the year.

Clarkson, who writes a column for the Sun and the Sunday Times, is the sole shareholder of the company although he and his wife, Frances, are both directors.

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Clarkson was dropped as co-host of the motoring show in March last year after he punched producer Oisin Tymon in a row over hot food after a day’s filming.

Along with his former Top Gear colleagues, James May and Richard Hammond, Clarkson went on to sign a three-series deal with Amazon, reportedly worth £160m. The new show is expected to launch later this year though its importance means that Clarkson is already fronting Amazon’s television ads.

Newincco 1189 was created in 2012 just before Clarkson and former Top Gear executive producer Andy Wilman (who has also defected to Amazon) were bought out of another company called Bedder 6 by the BBC. Bedder 6 used to be a joint venture between the pair and BBC Worldwide. It controlled the commercial rights to Top Gear with BBC Worldwide holding a 50% stake and Clarkson and Wilman sharing the rest.

It is not known from the figures provided how much of the funds in Newincco 1189 come from Clarkson’s BBC work – presenting Top Gear and co-hosting arena show Top Gear Live – or from his other work as an author and newspaper columnist. A spokesman for Clarkson declined to comment on the figures.

Clarkson hit the headlines again this week after comments he made about transgender people in his Sunday Times column. In the article he spoke about a couple being “allowed to poison the mind of a child” by letting their son live as a girl from a young age, before questioning the difficulties faced by transgender prisoners, suggesting that those who ask to transfer to a female prison simply want to “spend the rest of their lives being a lesbian”.