Giambrone: Admitted five charges
A high-profile Italian lawyer who failed to declare various adverse findings about himself when applying to be called to the English Bar has been reprimanded and fined £50,000 – an exceptionally high sum for a Bar disciplinary tribunal.
Gabriele Giambrone, Milan-based global managing partner of Giambrone & Partners and head of its European litigation and arbitration team, was called in 2021 and is described on the Bar Standards Board’s (BSB) register as an employed barrister at the firm’s London office.
The full reasons for the decision have yet to be published but the summary said Mr Giambrone admitted five of the six charges that he made a false call declaration.
He answered ‘no’ to the question of whether he had ever been subject to any investigations or proceedings by a professional or regulatory body, when in 2016 he had been suspended for six months by the Bar Association of Palermo.
Mr Giambrone was also previously on the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s register of European lawyers but in 2013 the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal ordered that his name be removed from it after finding a host of accounting irregularities at his firm, called Giambrone Law, while acting for clients in overseas property deals. The tribunal described the firm’s accounts as a “shambles”.
A Bar Standards Board spokesman confirmed to Legal Futures that Mr Giambrone had not declared this either when applying to be called but did not explain why it was not included in the charges against him.
He similarly replied ‘no’ to the question: “Are there any other matters which might reasonably be thought to call into question your fitness to become a practising barrister? This includes but is not limited to civil injunctions or criminal orders.”
The Bar tribunal found that Mr Justice Foskett had made “adverse comments” about Mr Giambrone’s credibility as a witness first in 2015 and again in 2019, and as well as holding he had concealed the date of his knowledge of the terms of certain mandates.
They were in the context of major litigation in which the judge found in 2015 that he and his firm had been under a duty to warn British and Irish property investors of the risks of investing in a part of Italy associated with organised crime, a decision upheld by the Court of Appeal two years later.
The multi-million-pound claims by investors in the failed development did not suggest that the defendants were part or knew of the criminal activities lying behind the development.
In 2019, Foskett J made a non-party costs order against Giambrone Law’s professional indemnity insurer after the firm had failed to satisfy costs orders arising from the litigation.
The Bar tribunal found that Mr Giambrone also failed to declare breaching a 2015 High Court order to pay costs.
Separately, Mr Giambrone failed to disclose that, in 2013, the High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland made a freezing injunction against his personal assets as part of a claim against him.
This was continued after a comment the lawyer made on Facebook, referring to the claimants: “They thought they knocked me down, now they will see the full scale of my reaction. F*** them, just f*** them. They will be left with nothing.”
The charge said this post “reasonably caused” the claimants and court to conclude that Mr Giambrone was at risk of dissipating his assets or seeking to frustrate any judgment that may be made.
Mr Giambrone was also ordered to pay costs of £2,244.
Dean Jones 
Why is this person still a barrister?