Lawyer suspended for misleading Court of Appeal

Thursday 08 October 2015

A senior lawyer has been suspended for misleading the Court of Appeal, and a junior lawyer at the same firm has been found guilty of misconduct and censured.

Advocate Philip Sinel – the senior partner of Sinels – has been suspended for four months, and Advocate Steven Chiddicks of the same firm has been given a public rebuke.

Although it was found that the point that the court was misled over was "at the lower end of the scale", and would not have affected the substance of the court's judgment, only the timing of its delivery, it was found necessary to impose a suspension and rebuke.

The case concerns the fact that neither lawyer told the Court of Appeal during proceedings during long-running litigation involving Leeds United in 2011 that a writ stopping a time-bar - effectively a deadline to take action - on applications before the English courts had been filed.

That writ was filed in October 2011 during argument on whether Jersey or England was the right place for the case to be heard – Advocates Sinel and Chiddicks were trying to persuade the court to hear the case in Jersey.

In a hearing the following January, they cited the time-bar in English cases which in some cases restricts actions for fraud to six years, but never said that the filing of the writ had effectively “stopped the clock”.

A month after that hearing it was served – prompting the lawyers for the other side to write to the Court of Appeal saying that they were “surprised and disappointed” that it had not been mentioned before.

A judge from the Court of Appeal referred the matter to the Disciplinary Committee of the Law Society, who referred a complaint against the two lawyers to the Royal Court.

In their own letter to the Court, Advocates Sinel and Chiddicks had "apologised unreservedly" if they were felt not to have made their position clear.

It was also pointed out that Advocate Sinel was an experienced lawyer, who had a track record of taking on cases that were perceived as "lost causes", sometimes on a pro bono basis. Advocate Chiddicks had only been qualified for a year at the time, and the court's attention was drawn to his "unblemished record" and his work in community projects such as youth football.

A hearing was held in January at which both lawyers gave evidence, and found that they had deliberately misled the court.

Their judgment found: “The Court had the opportunity of sight and sound of the respondents.

“In its view the respondents were, taking the most charitable interpretation of their evidence, imposing with the benefit of hindsight a construction of the material events which was at odds with their acts and words at the time.

“In the Court’s view too, the respondents knew what they were doing and saying and to the extent that they considered those acts and words to be justified, they were wrong.”

They decided that Advocate Sinel, who has been an Advocate for 28 years and who has run his own, award-winning firm for the last 25, should be suspended for four months, and that Advocate Chiddicks should be reprimanded. Advocate Chiddicks was initially to be suspended for two months, but the Court of Appeal reduced that sanction to a public rebuke instead.