A serial litigant who has ‘repeatedly advanced baseless allegations of dishonesty and bad faith’ in a litany of claims has been banned from bringing claims in the High Court for two years.
Sayed Sangamneheri has sued arbitrator Jonathan Bellamy, the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (CIArb), a High Court master and others, including their solicitors, since the 2015 collapse of an arbitration concerning a contract to exchange plots of land for gold.
He first brought a judicial review against Bellamy, his clerk and CIArb after Bellamy resigned as the arbitrator. This was dismissed as being totally without merit. He then sued Bellamy for 583,387,844,759,442,000,000,000kg of gold – which the High Court heard is ‘more than the total amount of gold ever mined in the world’.
His claim was struck out as totally without merit by Master Robert Kay QC. Kay referred Sangamneheri to a High Court judge who made an extended civil restraint order (ECRO) in 2018.
However, Sangamneheri has since ‘made one application or claim after another, in various different courts, in connection with his grievances in respect of the arbitration, which as time has gone on have included claims directed against various of the lawyers involved’, a judge ruled this week.
Patricia Robertson QC, sitting as a High Court judge, imposed another ECRO after striking out Sangamneheri’s latest claim – for £33.3 quadrillion – against CIArb, its president, three current or former members of its staff and Bellamy, as being totally without merit.
The judge expressed concern at the ‘cavalier manner in which [Sangamneheri] appears to be prepared to make serious allegations of dishonesty and bad faith, against an ever-expanding list of people’, adding that ‘there is every reason to expect that, unless an ECRO is made, he will continue.
‘It is, quite frankly, in his own interests that he be restrained if he is incapable (as it seems) of restraining himself, since the only result of these repeated attempts at litigating these matters is that he is incurring ever greater liabilities for costs,’ she said.
Robertson concluded that she will refer her ruling to the attorney general ‘so that consideration may be given to an indefinite civil proceedings order’.
