Letter: Backdated by solicitor
A solicitor who sought to cover up his failure to serve a claim on the defendant by fabricating a letter and then misleading the court in writing and orally has been struck off.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) said Gabriel Awosika’s behaviour was “calculated and repeated over a sustained period”.
Mr Awosika, who is 50, qualified in 2012 and was a director and solicitor at East London law firm Astute Dynamic, which the shut down by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in July this year.
The SDT heard that he issued a clinical negligence claim on behalf of two clients in February 2019 and had to serve it by 26 June.
Despite Bevan Brittan (BB), the defendant NHS trust’s solicitors, expressly telling him it was not instructed to accept service of proceedings, Mr Awosika nonetheless posted BB a letter dated 20 June 2019 enclosing the particulars of claim but not the claim form.
BB tried to clarify the situation by telephone but could not make contact with Mr Awoskia.
In July, he told BB that he had served both it and NHS Resolution with a copy of the claim form and particulars.
The Civil Procedure Rules require that a claim form must be served on a defendant directly where solicitors are not instructed and here there was no certificate of service in respect of the defendant trust. BB sought a court order that the proceedings had not been validly served.
At a court hearing in January 2020, Mr Awosika produced a file copy of a letter he had purportedly sent directly to the defendant on 20 June 2019, enclosing the claim form and particulars of claim.
The court ordered the claimants to file and serve data relating to its making and service.
The application was heard in June 2020 and Mr Awosika provided three witness statements: one stating that he served the claim form and particulars on BB and NHS Resolution only; a second that exhibited the 20 June 2019 letter; and a third that “purported to explain the circumstances” of its creation. He gave oral evidence to the same effect.
His Honour Roberts in Central London County Court found the witness statements contradictory and inconsistent with the contemporaneous documentary evidence.
He said Mr Awosika had failed to explain why he had not mentioned in his first statement that he had served on the defendant too and did not explain either in the statements or orally why he had not completed a certificate of service for the defendant when he had for BB and NHS Resolution.
The font, signature and text in the letter to the defendant was different from that to BB and NHS Resolution, which the judge considered “highly unlikely” if, as Mr Awosika contended, they were written at the same time.
HHJ Roberts concluded the defendant was not served in time and that the 20 June 2019 letter was prepared on a later date and back-dated.
Before the SDT, Mr Awosika denied he had done this, maintaining that the different font was due to computer problems, and that the second witness statement was intended to correct the omission in the first.
The hearing took place in his absence, the solicitor emailing the SDT on the day to say he would not be attending following the intervention into his practice.
The SDT said it was “satisfied that the letter of 20 June 2019 was false”, meaning that Mr Awosika’s witness statements and oral evidence misled the court. There was “no reason to depart from the conclusions” of the judge.
In mitigation, Mr Awosika pointed to his exemplary record, that neither client had complained and one continued to instruct him, and that at the time he had been dealing with the death of his father and various issues that flowed from it.
Deciding sanction, the SDT said it considered his culpability to be high. “He had full control of the situation. He was an experienced solicitor, by his own admission. He made a mistake, by failing to serve the NHS defendant trust directly, and then covered up his mistake by fabricating a letter, and presenting a misleading version of events repeatedly, in two sworn statements and in oral evidence before the court. His actions were planned.
“The tribunal considered the level of harm caused by the respondent’s actions to be extremely high.”
The mitigating factors “were of a purely personal nature and did not diminish the seriousness of the misconduct”. There was no reason to order anything other than a strike-off.
Mr Awosika was also ordered to pay costs of £28,500.
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