A struck-off solicitor who repeatedly breached an injunction by using confidential documents in a series of ‘hopeless’ race discrimination claims against the regulator has been sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment for contempt.
Michael Otobo, 58, used a forensic investigation report concerning a law firm on five occasions between 2016 and 2020 as he made ‘untrue and misconceived allegations of race discrimination’ against the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Law Society, the court heard.
The former solicitor was previously held in contempt and given a six-month suspended sentence in 2012 for sending the report to two other struck-off solicitors, which the High Court then said was an attempt to ‘stimulate further spurious, poorly-founded litigation’.
Otobo, who was struck off in 2009, has ‘brazenly continued to bring claims and make applications’ using the report, the SRA’s barrister Adam Solomon QC said, including in an unsuccessful application to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal last year.
The tribunal described Otobo’s attempt to link the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter campaign to his regulatory history as a ‘disgrace’ – and Solomon said Otobo has now ‘doubled down on his wrongdoing’.
‘He is continually referring to the forensic investigation report … doing so in a way to advance his false and wicked allegations of discrimination and it is doubly reprehensible to do so referring to George Floyd,’ he told the court.
Otobo also deployed the report in a 2018 employment tribunal case for alleged racial discrimination brought against the Law Society and the SRA – despite never having been an employee of either body.
Otobo did not attend the hearing today as Judge Murray Shanks held him in contempt for using the disclosed documents on five occasions, failing to return or delete them and for lying in a 2012 affidavit in which he claimed he had not retained any copies. He sentenced Otobo to 18 months’ imprisonment and issued a bench warrant for his arrest.
The judge also made a general civil restraint order, preventing Otobo from bringing claims in the High Court, county court, employment tribunal or the SDT for two years, and agreed to send a recommendation to the attorney general that Otobo be put on the ‘list of vexatious litigants’.
Shanks also ordered Otobo to pay the SRA’s costs in the sum of £40,000, however the court previously heard that the former solicitor has already cost the SRA ‘tens of thousands’ in unpaid costs orders.
