High Court rejects bias allegation against SDT

The High Court has rejected an allegation of bias against leading property lawyer and former Law Society compliance board chairman Richard Hegarty, relating to his role as solicitor member of the SDT.

A solicitor struck off by the SDT claimed that Hegarty, one of the two solicitor members on the panel at his hearing, should have disclosed his previous appointment as an SRA adjudicator.

The court heard that Bruce Ighalo's firm, First Solicitors, in Greenwich, ceased to trade in 2008. Ighalo was struck off by the SDT in 2011. He admitted four allegations of breaching the accounts rules. The tribunal also upheld four other allegations against him, including acting dishonestly in using a loan for an unauthorised purpose.

Ighalo appealed to the High Court against this finding and argued that the composition of the tribunal was "such that it could not be said to have been independent or impartial."

Hegarty, senior partner of Hegarty Solicitors in Peterborough, set up his firm in 1974 and is a former Law Society council member. He worked as a part-time SRA adjudicator for around ten years until August 2009, before being appointed a solicitor member of the SDT three months later.

Delivering the judgment of the court in Ighalo v the SRA [2013] EWHC 661 (Admin), Mrs Justice Swift said that at the time the SDT heard Ighalo's case, in 2011, Hegarty had not carried out any work for the SRA for over two years.

Swift J said it was not suggested that Hegarty had played any role in the SRA's investigation of Ighalo's case.

She said that Ighalo's QC, Manjit Gill, had for the first time at the appeal hearing, suggested Hegarty could have used his access to the SRA's computer system to find information about the investigation into First Solicitors.

Dismissing the suggestion as "fanciful" and "entirely speculative", Swift J said: "It seems highly unlikely that a solicitor in private practice whose role with the respondent was merely to carry out adjudicatory functions in specific cases as and when required, would - even if the respondent's computer system permitted him access to do so - have spent his time trawling through the respondent's electronic records in order to read about investigations in other cases with which he had no involvement."

Swift J said that since it was "well established that the mere fact that Mr Hegarty had previously held an appointment as an adjudicator for the respondent could not of itself give rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias, there can have been no general duty on him to disclose his previous appointment".

She said that Hegarty would, however, have a duty to "disclose any personal friendship or close association" which subsisted between himself and any of the witnesses in the case or any other matter that might have affected his impartiality, but there was "no evidence that any of these circumstances existed".

Ighalo's QC also claimed that there was "real cause for concern" as to Hegarty's impartiality and independence arising from his role as head of the panel which decided that the SRA should intervene into London firm Dean and Dean.

Swift J said: "As a consequence of the intervention, the former senior partner of Dean and Dean, Mr Rajesh Mireshkandari, had issued proceedings in California against the respondent and a number of individuals, including Mr Hegarty. Mr Gill argued that Mr Hegarty had a continuing interest in common with the respondent in defending those proceedings.

"It was possible that he also had a continuing financial involvement with the respondent, since the respondent might well be underwriting his legal costs and/or providing him with legal representation for the proceedings."

However, Swift J said the Dean and Dean proceedings were not started until four months after the tribunal heard Ighalo's case and the suggestion that he would have known at the time of the SDT hearing that proceedings would be instituted against him was "mere speculation".

Even if he had been aware of the possibility and discussed it with the SRA, it was difficult to understand how it could give rise to a "reasonable apprehension of bias" in a "wholly unconnected" case, she said.

"We are driven to the conclusion that, in raising this matter at the last moment, the appellant was 'clutching at straws' in an attempt to establish the existence of actual or apparent bias on the part of Mr Hegarty."

Swift J said there was "no reason to believe that Mr Hegarty was not fully able to bring objective judgment to bear on the appellant's case." She dismissed Ighalo's appeal on this ground.

She also dismissed his second ground of appeal against the SDT's finding that he had acted dishonestly. Lord Justice Laws contributed to the judgment.