The Solicitors Regulation Authority should be forced to seek High Court approval before it can intervene in and shut down a law firm. So argues eminent silk Gregory Treverton-Jones KC, who has again called for the regulator to be subject to ‘much-needed accountability’ for its decision-making.
Writing in today’s Gazette, Treverton-Jones relates how south London immigration practitioner Rashid Khan’s career and health were ‘destroyed’ by disciplinary proceedings, even though he was found entirely innocent.
Khan, a client of Treverton-Jones, was among those targeted in a 2023 ‘sting’ operation by the Daily Mail seeking evidence that lawyers were promoting bogus asylum claims. The paper ran a story alleging that Khan told a client to ‘lie’ to the Home Office. His office windows were smashed.
Khan was later exonerated by the tribunal, but has nevertheless been ruined ‘by the combined actions of the Mail, the government and the SRA’, says Treverton-Jones.
‘This shames our legal system to the core,’ he adds. ‘A hard-working solicitor from an ethnic minority found himself professionally ruined by three extremely powerful institutions. Although the case against him turned out to be threadbare, the price he paid was the destruction of his legal career and his reputation, damage to his physical and mental health, and the payment of more than £100,000 in irrecoverable legal costs to defend himself – in addition to the six-figure sum demanded of him by the SRA as the costs of the intervention.’
Treverton-Jones, long-time co-author of The Solicitor’s Handbook, makes several proposals to ensure ‘such a fundamental injustice’ can be avoided in future.
He argues that the SRA should be stripped of its statutory power to intervene on the basis of ‘a reason to suspect dishonesty’. Parliament should instead ‘provide the SRA with statutory authority to apply to the High Court for an intervention order’, he writes. ‘Save in truly urgent cases, the court could provide a sensible regime by which respondent solicitors can put their side of the story before it is too late.’
