SRA publishes 19 allegations against Leigh Day

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has published the 19 allegations of misconduct against Leigh Day, which it says will be subject to a hearing before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

Chief among them are charges are making prohibited referral fees and failing to supply important documentation to the Al-Sweady inquiry into supposed abuses by British soldiers in 2004, when the firm acted for Iraqi nationals.

The SRA has said that senior partner Martyn Day and partner Sapna Malik had made, and endorsed, allegations that the British Army had unlawfully killed, tortured and mistreated Iraqi civilians in circumstances “where it was improper to do so”.

It also said that Day and Malik had failed to provide an OMS Detainee List to another law firm and that the lawyers approved a prohibited referral fee of £25,000 in December 2008 and another for £50,000 in March 2009 to an individual referred to as ‘Z’. The SRA said that Leigh Day also concealed the breaches.

The fees were banned as they were for claims for death or personal injury to “a third party whose business was to support claims arising as a result of death or personal injury”; historic; and made in relation to a public funded case.

Legal Futures has reported a Leigh Day spokesman saying: “We have now been served with a formal set of charges based on some 30 files of material. Our legal team has now started the process of reviewing all that evidence. The matter is now formally before the tribunal, so it would not be appropriate for us to comment further.”

Mark Dugdale