Henshaw: No merit in appeal
The High Court has rejected claims of bias against the chair of a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) panel.
The claims were made by David Hinkel, who has launched a series of unsuccessful legal and disciplinary actions against City firm Simmons & Simmons and its solicitors and was made subject to an extended civil restraint order in 2021.
The SDT ordered Mr Hinkel to pay costs of £291,000 in January 2023 after throwing out a private prosecution he sought to bring against two Simmons & Simmons solicitors.
Delivering judgment, Mr Justice Henshaw said Mr Hinkel claimed that Angela Horne, a professional regulation specialist at Mills & Reeve, “showed bias against him” in that decision and a later decision in August that year that there was no prima facie case in further allegations brought by Mr Hinkel against Simmons & Simmons and partner Matthew Hooton.
Ms Horne had previously worked for Clyde & Co, which acted for Simmons in the litigation Mr Hinkel brought, Mr Hinkel pointed out.
He said it was “inappropriate” for Ms Horne to hear the later application as she had been chair of the January 2023 panel and the August 2023 decision was “riddled with the usual bias expected of her”.
Mr Hinkel cited a paragraph from the SDT’s August decision describing his statement and supporting material as “riven with a substantial amount of irrelevant information/documents” and containing “complaints against persons and bodies” who were not the subject of the application.
The SDT said it “fell to the panel to sift through the material provided to determine their relevance and indeed determine the core issue of the application itself”.
Mr Hinkel said this showed Ms Horne’s “palpable anger” that he had appealed against the SDT’s January 2023 decision.
Dismissing the complaint, Henshaw J said: “Mr Hinkel did indeed place a large volume of materials, including much irrelevant material, before the SDT.
“Nonethless, the SDT sifted through it and applied its mind properly to the real issues. Nothing in the decision or the evidence before me supports the view that Mrs Horne was biased. Nor does the fact that she chaired the panel which took the January 2023 decision.”
The proceedings represented another front in Mr Hinkel’s long-running campaign against Simmons & Simmons, which also involved an unsuccessful civil claim, all arising out its work for him on a failed attempt in 2017 to acquire an English property owned by the Republic of Iran.
The civil restraint order was made in 2021 after the court rejected multiple further applications from Mr Hinkel.
In 2019, after the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) declined to act on his complaint, Mr Hinkel sought to bring a private prosecution but the SDT refused to certify it and the High Court rejected his appeal.
He tried again in 2022 and the SDT this time certified there was a case to answer, a decision another panel subsequently revoked in January 2023 because Mr Hinkel had not informed the first panel about the 2019 application. Had he, it said, in all likelihood the application would not have been certified.
The High Court dismissed an appeal against this in February 2024.
There was then a further SDT decision in August 2023 over two erroneous submissions Simmons & Simmons made to the court as part of earlier proceedings to the effect that a certain application by Mr Hinkel was caught by the ECRO.
They were “promptly corrected” when the errors came to light but Mr Hinkel complained to the SRA that Simmons had committed misconduct by making knowingly false statements.
The SRA decided to take no action and Mr Hinkel then applied to the SDT, which held the application did not raise an arguable case. Mr Hinkel sought to appeal this decision, arguing that the SDT made “fundamental judgmental errors” in its decision.
Henshaw J said it was “inherently unlikely” that Simmons and their lawyers would “deliberately set out to mislead the court, still less in en masse”.
He went on: “Conversely, the respondents had a clear and good motive for seeking to close down Mr Hinkel’s applications so far as they could, given his vexatious and multi-faceted pursuit of unmeritorious claims against them.”
The SDT was “clearly right” in forming the opinion that there was no “prima facie” case against Simmons & Simmons and Mr Hooton.
Henshaw J rejected a further argument made by Mr Hinkel that there were “serious procedural failures” because he was “not invited to use the SDT’s CaseLines document filing system” and was “unaware what was placed on it”.
The judge rejected further allegations “which have already been rejected at earlier stages in this litigation”.
Henshaw J ruled that there was “no merit” in the appeal.
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