A law firm manager convicted of raping a woman has been struck off the roll of solicitors. The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal approved the sanction for Shah Syed Rashid Masood Sahib, admitted in 2004, who is currently serving an eight-year sentence at HMP Nottingham.
Sahib was a partner at Midlands firm Syeds Solicitors. He was convicted at Nottingham Crown Court in February 2024 following the incident in 2020.
The tribunal heard that Sahib, who was known to the victim, had spoken to her about his three 'wives' and children and suggested that she should marry him. When the two were alone, he telephoned an Imam of a mosque and said he wanted to go ahead with a marriage ceremony. She tried to distract him and talk about something else, but Sahib attacked her over a period of several minutes.
The victim was crying during the course of the incident and Sahib never asked if she was allright or whether she consented to sex. When it had finished, he told her: ‘I don’t know what happened to me.’
The victim reported the matter to the police and Sahib was arrested the next day. In a victim statement given to the court, she had described feeling ‘depressed, emotional and broken’ and having suicidal thoughts. She had to take the morning-after pill in case of pregnancy and medication in case of infection. More than a year on from the incident, she had retreated into personal isolation at home and still suffered from nightmares.
Sahib was initially sentenced to 54 months’ imprisonment but this was increased to eight years at the Court of Appeal due to the seriousness and aggravating features of the offence.
Sahib did not attend the SDT hearing but indicated it should go ahead in his absence.
The tribunal found no mitigation and said: ‘For conduct of this nature there were no words within the lexicon of regulatory and disciplinary conduct adequate to express the damage the respondent had caused to the victim and to the reputation of the profession.’
Sahib was struck off an ordered to pay £6,250 costs.
