This article has been updated to note a referral by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
A barrister who was disbarred after she was convicted of failing to disclose a change in her financial circumstances relating to council tax benefits and then lied to an appellate court has failed with a bid to return to the profession.
Sky Bibi, 40, was disbarred last year following her conviction at Cheshire Magistrates’ Court in 2018 under the Council Tax Reduction Schemes (Detection of Fraud Enforcement) (England) Regulations 2013.
Her failure to disclose the change to her employment status and receipt of income meant she received £1,054.24 in council tax benefit to which she was not entitled. She was sentenced to a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay a fine of £1,000 and a victim surcharge of £20.
However, the sentence was changed to a 12-month community order and a 28-day curfew after she appealed her conviction at Chester Crown Court. The judge dismissed her appeal and found that Bibi had given evidence and made submissions that were dishonest.
The Bar Tribunals & Adjudication Service (BTAS) said that, in relation to Bibi’s criminal conviction, ‘we find it impossible to do [anything] other than disbar’ and suspended her practising certificate with immediate effect.
Bibi, called to the bar in 2007, was also found to have failed to disclose the fact of her conviction and sentence during the course of her recruitment by Backhouse Jones Solicitors. The tribunal said she provided a Disclosure and Barring Service certificate which was obtained before her conviction and then did not disclose her conviction to the firm during her four-month period of employment.
She appealed to the High Court, arguing that BTAS did not have jurisdiction to hear the charges as they were served late and to the wrong address, and because she was convicted of a summary-only offence.
But Bibi’s appeal was dismissed today, with Mrs Justice Hill ruling that there was ‘no jurisdictional issue or serious procedural irregularity’ in relation to service.
The judge rejected the contention that the tribunal’s jurisdiction was limited to indictable offences, saying that ‘conduct need not be criminal at all, let alone indictable, to amount to professional misconduct’.
Bibi had also argued that the tribunal was not entitled to rely on her conviction as ‘conclusively proving the offence’, but Hill said: ‘The tribunal was entitled to rely on the relevant documents from the criminal proceedings as proof of the appellant’s conviction.’
Update 22 June: The Criminal Cases Review Commission has since referred Bibi’s conviction at the magistrates’ court to the Crown court on the grounds that ‘there is a real possibility the prosecution was invalid as proceedings were not issued within the time limits’.
