Mohindru: Eight and a half month suspension is enough
The High Court has overturned the disbarment of a barrister who lied in an interview and on a CV 13 years ago that he had attended Oxford University.
Mr Justice Johnson found that the Bar disciplinary tribunal had misdirected itself and decided to redetermine the sanction to be imposed on Anurag Mohindru KC himself, rather than delay matters by remitting it back to the tribunal.
He considered there were exceptional circumstances, such as the passage of time since the “isolated incident” and the criminal law silk’s exemplary conduct since, that meant disbarment – the usual outcome in cases of dishonesty – was not the minimum sanction required to uphold confidence in the profession.
Instead, he said the suspension Mr Mohindru had been under since the tribunal eight and a half months ago was a “sufficient sanction”, meaning he is free to return to practice.
Mr Mohindru was called in 2004 at the age of 29, after an unsuccessful attempt to pursue a medical career. A keen cricketer, he resigned as chair of Essex County Cricket Club following his disbarment.
In 2013, he was looked to move chambers and attended an interview at one, where he was asked whether he had a “blue”, in other words, had he represented Oxford University at cricket in the annual varsity match against Cambridge University.
The question came from a member of the panel who had – through no fault of Mr Mohindru’s – wrongly assumed he had attended Oxford. He nonetheless replied incorrectly that he had.
A member of the panel was sceptical and conducted online research during the interview and was unable to find any record of Mr Mohindru playing cricket for Oxford.
Mr Mohindru was asked to provide his CV, which he subsequently did, changing it to read that he spent a year studying medicine at Oxford. This too was untrue.
He subsequently withdrew his application and moved to another set. He did not send it the amended CV and has not repeated the lie since.
It was not until eight and a half years later, in 2021, the year after he took silk, that the Bar Standards Board received an anonymous complaint about what the barrister had done.
The Bar tribunal ultimately decided that – despite “the passage of time and the completely exemplary conduct of his professional career since these matters occurred” – there were no exceptional circumstances to justify anything other than disbarment.
Johnson J held that the tribunal misdirected itself in saying that exceptional circumstances “must relate in some way to the dishonesty itself, rather than to any personal mitigation”.
This was “a more rigid test than that laid down in the authorities”, the judge explained.
“Nothing in the authorities indicates that a very long passage of time since the dishonesty is entirely irrelevant to the question of sanction, or that where there is such a long passage of time the exemplary conduct over that period is also entirely irrelevant.”
Though personal mitigation had to be treated with “particular care”, the relevance of the passage of time was “not limited to personal mitigation” here.
It was “relevant to the impact on public confidence that a practising lawyer was dishonest many years ago, in a very particular context, at a completely different stage of their life, and that they have shown the highest integrity ever since, such that they cannot now be said to be a dishonest person…
“The point is not that delay by itself mitigates sanction, still less that the regulator is to be penalised for the delay.
“The point is that the antiquity of the dishonesty, and the subsequent professional record, is relevant to what sanction is now required to maintain public confidence…
“Of course, he should not have lied. But it is far from the most egregious dishonesty.”
The CV lie was “more serious”, Johnson J said, as it was “not a spur of the moment panicked answer”, but it was still something done within a short period of time.
“In the context of a career spanning 20 years, the two lies within a short space of time, possibly less than 24 hours, can properly be regarded as an isolated incident.”
The judge added: “One line in his CV which said that he had been at Oxford University for one year (which in itself might have raised further questions) was not something that would materially improve his prospects of securing a tenancy.”
He concluded that “the nature and extent of the dishonesty in this case, taken together with the passage of time, were capable of amounting to exceptional circumstances”.
There was also a suggestion that the tribunal may have treated the way in which Mr Mohindru conducted his case as an aggravating feature of the misconduct. If it was, then that was wrong, the judge said.
In deciding the sanction afresh, the factors Johnson J took into account included that Mr Mohindru did not secure any material gain from the dishonesty, the lies did not cause any material harm to anyone, aside from Mr Mohindru and his family, and nobody at the time considered it was sufficiently serious to report him to the regulator.
Further, “Mr Mohindru is not dishonest. He has shown over a two decade career that he has personal and professional integrity and that he is a highly regarded and successful silk”, while he has been greatly punished.
“He has suffered the mortification and humiliation of a public finding that he was dishonest in 2013, with a resultant considerable fall from grace. He has been suspended for 8½ months with significant consequential loss of income. He has to pay costs of £36,155.”
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