Former Law Society president David Greene appeared at the Court of Appeal today in his bid to strike out disciplinary proceedings against him over allegations that he lied on oath.
Greene, senior partner at London firm Edwin Coe, faces a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal case brought by former client David Davies, who claims the high-profile solicitor gave deliberately misleading evidence to a county court judge in 2012 in a dispute about some £7,000 in unpaid fees.
District Judge Stewart ruled in Edwin Coe’s favour and, in 2016, the same judge rejected Davies’ application to set aside the earlier judgment based on the allegation that Greene misled the court.
Davies’ case against Greene was struck out by the SDT in 2019 but that decision was overturned last year by the High Court, which found that Greene arguably gave evidence which was ‘not only misleading but deliberately so’.
Greene, who resigned as Law Society president to prevent the proceedings becoming a ‘distraction’, argues that the case against him is ‘an abusive collateral attack’ on the 2016 ruling that he did not give misleading evidence, and thus should be struck out.
‘The 2016 judgment … addressed and determined the very question that is at the heart of the disciplinary proceedings and, that being so, the disciplinary proceedings are an abusive collateral attack on the 2016 judgment,’ Greene’s barrister Ben Hubble QC told the court. He added that the case against Greene, which he described as ‘an unjust harassment’, has ‘no prospect of success because the 2016 judgment is the answer’.
‘It plainly brings the administration of justice into disrepute when a prosecutor initiates disciplinary proceedings to consider whether a judge has been misled when that very issue was raised by the same individual in civil proceedings before the judge in question, who determined in the clearest of possible terms that he had not been,’ Hubble said in written submissions.
Martina Murphy, for Davies, argued that the case before the SDT does not address ‘the same question’ as the proceedings in the county court. ‘The appellant must show that the question in the 2016 judgment was identical to that before the disciplinary proceedings so that it can be properly called a “collateral attack”,’ she said in her skeleton argument.
Murphy added: ‘The two sets of proceedings, civil and regulatory, were different in a number of respects. The decision in the civil proceedings was not, and could not be, a final determination of the regulatory proceedings.
‘Even if it is the identical question, there is no manifest unfairness to the appellant, nor is the administration of justice brought into disrepute.’
The hearing continues.
