A struck-off solicitor has been given a suspended sentence for contempt of court over ‘abusive and vile’ messages sent to Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal staff in breach of an injunction.
Farid El Diwany mounted a ‘campaign of harassment’ against SDT chief executive Geraldine Newbold and Colin Chesterton, a retired solicitor member of the tribunal who struck him off in 2019, the High Court heard yesterday.
The 63-year-old breached a court order preventing him from harassing any current or former member of the SDT 19 times in the space of 11 days in November last year.
El Diwany also sent threatening emails to Simon Tinkler, a partner at magic circle firm Clifford Chance who dismissed his application to be restored to the roll last year, the High Court found.
Mr Justice Sweeting said ‘each and every one of the 19 allegations’ amounted to breaches of the injunction and gave El Diwany an eight-week sentence, suspended for 18 months, for the messages which he said were ‘abusive, vile and in my view intended to intimidate and bully’.
El Diwany was struck off the roll after he was twice convicted of harassment in Norway, in 2001 and 2003, and failed to tell the regulator. An appeal against that decision was rejected by the High Court, as was an application for permission to appeal.
Last month, his judicial review against the Solicitors Regulation Authority over its decision not to investigate his complaint against two members of the SDT which struck him off was refused as being totally without merit.
The court heard that Newbold found El Diwany’s communications – many of which accused the SDT of Islamophobia – to be ‘highly offensive [and] distressing’, and that Tinkler took references to Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik to be a ‘personal threat’.
‘You may think you are a star at a big law firm and untouchable but in a second the good lord can take it all away,’ El Diwany wrote to Tinkler.
Sweeting said it was ‘startling’ that a former solicitor had sent messages of such a ‘sinister nature’. ‘These were serious breaches,’ the judge added. ‘You, as a former solicitor, must have known precisely what you were doing.’
El Diwany was also ordered to pay the claimants’ costs in the sum of £33,000, although he told the court: ‘I haven’t got a penny.’
