A former law firm owner who misled solicitors chasing him over a debt has lost his appeal against the subsequent strike-off.

Following a two-day hearing in the High Court, Mrs Justice Foster DBE ruled there were no grounds to interfere with the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal decision to find Raj Rajan Mariaddan had acted dishonestly.

The appellant had practised for almost 25 years as a solicitor and was a joint founder of north west London practice John Street Solicitors before it was shut down by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in 2021.

A year later, he was struck off by the tribunal which found that he misled solicitors representing the Legal Aid Agency [referred to as the Legal Aid Authority in the Foster ruling] pursuing him for an unpaid debt.

Asking to pay the debt in instalments, Mariaddan stated in an income and expenditure form that he had no bank account and that his monthly income was usually £500 from disability living allowance. He further said that he had not earned any income for at least two years and was a director with his firm in name only. When the SRA looked at evidence of his income, his firm’s accounts showed that he had drawn £28,000 from the LLP in the previous financial year and £7,300 the year before that.

On appeal, he submitted the SDT had been wrong to find the allegations proved, arguing that it had improperly developed the SRA’s case, arrived at findings that were ‘mutually inconsistent’ and based its conclusion on a ‘false promise’.

Foster said the challenges made to the court were in many cases a repetition of the complaints about the adequacy of evidence that had been made to the tribunal. Mariaddan had consistently argued he was careless and/or mistaken rather than dishonest, but the judge found the tribunal’s conclusions to be ‘entirely sustainable’.

‘The bald statement concerning the absence of a bank account was not true,’ she added. ‘The task for the tribunal was to assess the context, which included other documentation and the evidence Mr Mariaddan had given, and determine what the inference from the totality of the relevant materials should be. That is precisely what they did.’

She said Mariaddan had attempted to explain his responses to the LAA were confused by his imperfect English and inadequate self-expression, but the reality was the tribunal ‘saw and heard from Mr Mariaddan, and they disbelieved him'.

She added: ‘The SDT decision plainly is not appealably wrong on any of the technical grounds advanced. I reject each of the criticisms made of the decision, the pleadings, or the SDT’s approach to the evidence.’

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