The Mail reports that Thailand-based Geoffrey Giuliano offered to sell the negatives to an undercover reporter, who was posing as a collector. After sending over the contact sheet as proof he had the negatives, Giuliano, 62, a US author who is known to have a vast collection of Beatles memorabilia, demanded a cash transfer into his account - but pulled out of the deal after suspecting the buyer was acting for Ono.
He claimed the original photographer is dead but David Nutter is very much alive, and was furious to learn his images were being sold without his permission. He said: 'It's heart-breaking. It was the most important assignment for me ... I'm so angry.'
It was just a few months before the release of the Beatles' album Abbey Road when Nutter, then 30, was summoned by the band's Apple Corps executive Peter Brown and dispatched on "a top secret mission".
"He asked me to get on the next flight to Gibraltar. But he wouldn't tell me why. He just told me to take my camera."
Desperate to avoid the London paparazzi, Lennon and Ono had wanted to seal their nuptials in a private ceremony. After failing to do so on a cross-channel ferry and also Paris, they had been advised to do it in Gibraltar, where, as a British citizen, Lennon could wed immediately.
Nutter's coup turned to disaster in 1975 when he lent his negatives to Anthony Fawcett, a former assistant to Lennon, to be used in the book John Lennon: One Day At A Time.
"When I asked for the negatives back, he told me his apartment had been repossessed and everything had been taken," said Nutter. Later he claimed there had been a burglary.
- Mail on Sunday