It’s the fees that count for law firms, morality takes the back seat
Early in The Children Act, Richard Eyre’s excellent film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel of the same name, the family court judge announces her verdict on a particularly difficult case: “This is a court of law, not of morals.” Her Ladyship (Emma Thompson) was clearly torn but in the end there was no choice. The law is the law.
There are many branches of the law of course: the police, solicitors, the CPS, and barristers and judges. But it is the big law firms which seem increasingly to put fees (and whopping ones they are) above all else.
I have been brooding on this since reading that the odious Steven Yaxley-Lennon, aka far-right activist and thuggish street rabble-rouser Tommy Robinson, is being represented by Begbies Traynor. It is one of the UK’s leading business recovery firms and has been advising him after it was revealed that his string of companies had failed to file annual returns and to repay HMRC £328,000 in corporation tax and employees’ contributions. Yaxley-Lennon is now in jail for contempt of court over an unrelated offence.
I am sure Begbies will say everyone is entitled to advice no matter their moral standing. But the firm is not a barrister forced to defend anyone so long as they deny an offence. They could have walked away with the throwaway ’Not for us thanks’. But like the law firms, it’s the fees that count. And sometimes those fees seem immoral in themselves.
In the case of the Post Office Scandal it emerged that the senior management of the Post Office, wholly owned by the Government, in other words you and me, had known since 2010 that there were faults in the Horizon IT system. Yet for five more years they pursued sub-postmasters and prosecuted 900 innocent people for theft and false accounting. Five committed suicide, 236 were jailed, lives were ruined with bankruptcies, local exclusion, broken marriages, humiliation and breakdowns.
That we know. Now it is revealed that in the time when the Post Office knew that the Fujitsu Horizon system was deeply flawed it paid lawyers to defend their case. Fees so far are £250million. A quarter of one billion. Taxpayers’ money. Those law firms are still being paid and in the case of City blue chipper Herbert Smith Freehills its share is £163million and counting by the day.
By contrast, the vast army of wrongly convicted sub-postmasters have been paid £250million so far, about £70,000 each in interim payments, for lives destroyed. I doubt, given what the management knew, that this derisory sum was legal. It certainly was not moral in any sense of the word.
Then we have Lloyds Bank and the HBOS scandal. And once again Herbert Smith Freehills is to the fore. Four years ago an all-party group of MPs and peers filed a complaint to the Solicitors Regulation Authority alleging HSF had acted either unethically or incompetently. A rare move against a leading law firm. The story goes back to the banking crisis of 2008 and the rescue by takeover of HBOS by Lloyds Banking Group. In particular it focuses around the activities of the bank’s Reading branch.
One disturbing case is that of Zenith, a publishing business owned by Paul and Nikki Turner from Cambridge. The Turners, whom I have met, applied to HBOS for a £160,000 loan which they received and within a year were introduced to Quayside Corporate Services run by David Mills. That meant a monthly fee to QCS for non-existent advice, fees which amounted to thousands over the years. And when the couple began to complain and then to investigate the activities of both Mills, QCS and the their HBOS manager Lynton Scourfield the net closed in on them in the most nightmarish way.
The bank tried 22 times to repossess their modest bungalow home where they lived with their two daughters. What followed was 13 years of hell, two little people fighting a corporate giant. They were not alone; in total there were more than 50 other business clients who had suffered the same tactics involving Mills of QCS and Scourfield of HBOS.
My old friend Brian Basham is currently trying to secure from Begbies the assets of Skin and Tonic, the organic skincare company into which he invested. Basham is a former Times investigative journalist who then revolutionised financial PR representing some of the biggest companies in the UK including British Airways. He was also one of three founders of the Centre for Investigative Journalism. He took up the Turners’ case knowing full well that even if HBOS was acting legally, it certainly wasn’t behaving with any sense of morality.
He explained: “I persevered in encouraging [an] enquiry for almost 20 years until the perpetrators were jailed for a total of 48 years in 2017. It was a long war of attrition with lawyers, driving victims into the grave. Paul Turner was the Alan Bates of the campaign and he too deserves a knighthood. Lloyds should have overruled their lawyers’ advice and settled much earlier in the interests of claimants and to protect the brand in the interest of shareholders.
“Nicki Turner, the valiant champion of victims for so many years, has succumbed to the strain with horrific consequences. She developed meningitis and then had a stroke which left her paralysed down one side. Lloyds still hasn’t learned Its lesson. The enquiry into the HBOS affair continues to plod on after eight years under the eminent judge Dame Linda Dobbs There are 50 lawyers riding the fees gravy train”.
In the case of Skin and Tonic, it was brought down by a fraud the perpetrator has admitted to. Basham has tried to bring him to justice but says Begbies refuses to provide him with the information he needs. “Thanks to Begbies’ intransigence a self-confessed fraudster remains at large instead of being put out of action”, he says. Begbies has been asked to comment but has refused.
Sadly it is not in the interests of law firms, or indeed the financial reconstruction companies, to close a case. The longer it goes on, the more the fees and the more the suffering of the victims.
It may be the law, but surely it isn’t moral.
*****
Well done Dickie Dismore. My friend and fellow columnist was spot on when he said the oafish oik Gregg Wallace is the Alf Garnett of our times. What astonishes me is what the TV production companies see is his appeal. As a foodie I am an occasional viewer of Masterchef and it can be – should be – great telly. But, why oh why Wallace? What is this self-confessed one-time Millwall rioter turned fruit and veg barrow boy doing passing judgment on other people’s cooking?
He’s good at shouting and showing off his ignorance (à la Garnett) but it’s clear he can’t cook or even employ someone who can. He has opened and closed two restaurants in London since 2012 owing thousands to suppliers and staff and it’s always someone else to blame.
Matthew Norman, formerly restaurant critic of the Guardian and Telegraph has not been known to hold back; of Wallace & Co which opened in 2012 he said: “The classic Tuscan vegetable soup ribollita appears to be made from left-over washing up water” and this: “cooking like this wouldn’t make it into even the first round of Masterchef”.
Marina O’Loughlin in Metro was no fan of Wallace’s second effort, Gregg’s Table, in Bermondsey: “A travesty of a restaurant... truly reprehensible was the beef stroganoff” and so on. And back to Matthew Norman: “I wouldn’t say that Gregg’s Table is abysmal but I’ve had more pleasure from root canal work”. This joint didn’t last more than a few months.
As a middle-class man of a certain (old) age it is clear to me we have seen the last of this yob on Masterchef. I shall be leaving no tip.
*****
Quentin Letts really does try too hard these days, desperate to ensure that each of his Mail sketches fit neatly into the paper’s right wing agenda. Fair enough (maybe) but his effort on last week’s Assisted Dying Bill was unworthy. He wrote of the sponsor of the bill, Kim Leadbeater, sister of murdered MP Jo Cox: “A weirdly chirpy character, she delivered her speech fast, almost gabbling. Shades of Jimmy Clitheroe...s he chirruped...s he gassed away” and so on.
Oh Quentin, leave the funny stuff to Craig Brown, he does it so much better.
ALAN FRAME
4 December 2024
