cabbie - 6:00 am on Jan 24, 2013 (gmt 0)

"Where the publisher admittedly clicked on his own ads?"

I don't see where Matimer the OP says he clicked on his own ads.
My friend's ban, was, as far as we could make out, because a Fortune 500 company created many ppc websites advertising their clients businesses and their partner's websites.
Some of these websites were well known for malware.
Whether the Fortune 500 company was complicit is a moot point.
My friend was unfortunate to have a resource website that all these websites linked to.
Then a sophisticated spam bot was set loose and would follow links on these websites and thus create false traffic and revenue.
My friend always wondered why he couldn't make any affiliate sales from the large traffic he was getting.
Anyway, his adsense a/c was banned, nothing was explained but he applied for another account a few months later with that website.
He even used his same name and bank account and was approved. 3 years later he and the site are still doing well.
He did redirect the referring traffic from those websites, however.
Not much later, Microsoft sued a company doing similar things for fraudulent bot activity.