A former solicitor may face a civil restraint order after his ‘misconceived’ appeal against being struck off was thrown out by the High Court.
Farid El Diwany must also pay £13,000 in costs to the Solicitors Regulation Authority after The Honourable Mr Justice Murray dismissed his appeal against the SRA ruling that he be struck off the roll of solicitors.
The 64-year-old’s grounds of appeal in El Diwany v SRA Ltd were dismissed for being ‘totally without merit’ in a judgment released today.
El Diwany was struck off the roll in 2019 after it emerged he had been twice convicted of harassment in Norway, in 2001 and 2003, and failed to inform the SRA. An appeal against that decision was rejected by the High Court, as was an application for permission to appeal.
Earlier this year, El Diwany was ordered to pay £10,000 in damages for harassing the chief executive of the SRA and a member of the panel that struck him off.
He made a rejected restoration application 20 months after being struck off, despite the usual six years normally expected. One of the reasons given by El Diwany was that if he waited the expected time, he would be over retirement age.
In this latest appeal against the SDT’s decision to not restore El Diwany to the roll, El Diwany represented himself as he did before the SDT panel in 2019 and 2021.
El Diwany, who has previously made allegations of Islamophobia against the SRA and SDT, was told in the judgment, which was handed down remotely, that he ‘misunderstood’ the SDT panel’s role in assessing whether he satisfied the necessary criteria to be restored to the roll.
The judge found that, despite submitting 'lengthy, diffuse and repetitive' written material, El Diwany had ‘relatively little to say, and nothing of any merit to say, in support of this grounds of appeal.’
In his concluding statement, Murray said: 'Mr El Diwany’s grounds of appeal are totally without merit. Accordingly, it is necessary for me to consider making a civil restraint order against him.
'There are other applications by Mr El Diwany that have been found to be totally without merit. In my order, I will give directions for a hearing at which the court will consider whether a civil restraint order should be made and, if so, what the scope of the civil restraint order should be.'
