A solicitor who was struck off after he was found to have dishonestly told a judge he was appearing remotely from London when he was in Munich is appealing the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal’s findings - arguing it placed an overreliance on a transcript that did not provide the full picture.
Priyank Tanwar, admitted in 2010, was found to have provided misleading information to Leicester County Court about his location during an hour-long hearing in August 2023. Tanwar had denied the allegations, saying it was not his intention to mislead the judge. He was struck off in January 2026 and ordered to pay £7,500 costs.
In a day-long hearing before Thomas Raphael KC, sitting as a deputy judge of the High Court, Rory Dunlop KC, for Tanwar, told the court the transcript did not show the context or the difficulties that Tanwar had in hearing what was being asked.
Tanwar, who has a hearing impairment, has an ‘impeccable regulatory history save for these proceedings and a wealth of testimonials to his character’ which were before the tribunal, the court was told.
Referring to English not being Tanwar’s first language, Dunlop said: ‘He is sufficiently competent to be a solicitor, but it was never his intention to be an advocate. To put it in layman’s terms, if you look [at the transcript] a lot of things were said. What he said to the recorder, they are kind of a word salad. You need to add words in or take words out to understand.’
Dunlop told the court the order for parties to attend court was ‘not an order for my client to attend, it was for the parties to attend and the tribunal got that wrong’.
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What the clerk at Leicester County Court, who was not called to the SDT to give evidence, said was not challenged, Dunlop said, adding: ‘She said Mr Tanwar, just before the hearing, communicated and said "I am abroad". He said this over the phone when all parties were present at court. It is an incredibly important point of the context.’
It would be ‘madness’ for Tanwar to then deliberately lie to the judge after telling everyone in court he was abroad, Dunlop said. ‘It also explains why he did not feel it necessary to say it again…and thought the judge must be asking about something else. It explains why he may have interpreted the judge’s questions in the way he did because he assumed the judge already knew he was abroad.’
Referring to an exchange in the transcript, Dunlop said it was ‘perfectly clear he is not hearing or understanding everything that is being said’.
‘You might say he was careless or reckless in how he expressed himself... but that does not amount to dishonesty,’ Dunlop said. The SDT ‘places far too much reliance on the transcript and assumed what is clear from the transcript was clear to my client on the other end of a phone in Germany. It is a core principle of their reasoning and its wrong. It’s an error of principle.'
‘[Tanwar] had no reason to tell a lie on a point you have already told the rest of the court that will end your career.’
Edward Morgan KC, for the Solicitors Regulation Authority, said: ‘The reality is there are numerous occasions in which there are exchanges between the recorder and Mr Tanwar in which his whereabouts, his ability to participate, are the subject of enquiry. In reality it was open to the tribunal to consider whether they believed the explanation [offered by Tanwar] to be correct.'
'What Mr Tanwar was doing in that hearing was representing a party in highly contested and very difficult family court proceedings. Whether he intended to be an advocate or not, his obligations to the court were exactly the same.'
Judgment was reserved.
