Mellor: Abuse of process
The High Court has refused to allow a struck-off solicitor to reopen vexatious litigation against the Law Society, Bar Council, senior judges, lawyers and many others.
Mr Justice Mellor said Anal Sheikh “appears to have lost all touch with reality and reason”.
“She would be well advised to relinquish her obsession with the Law Society’s powers of intervention and to accept the final decisions which have been made against her.”
Back in 2005, Ms Sheikh briefly became the first solicitor to successfully challenge what was then a pre-SRA Law Society intervention into her practice, but the Court of Appeal overturned the decision of Mr Justice Park.
A former conveyancing solicitor who was for many years the principal of a high street practice in London, she was struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal in 2009 for dishonesty.
Ms Sheikh was first made subject to a general civil restraint order the same year, renewed every two years thereafter, amid lengthy litigation over a dispute with a property developer and continuing complaints about the intervention.
In 2019, following an application from the Attorney General, she was made subject to an ‘all proceedings order’ under section 42 of the Senior Courts Act 1981, meaning she could not bring any civil and criminal case indefinitely without permission of the High Court.
The ruling listed 31 cases she had been involved in since 2005, which themselves made “references to a number of other judgments which could not be tracked down”.
The hearing last week was for permission not only to issue applications in dozens of proceedings – “all but one, long since concluded” – but also to initiate fresh proceedings, Mellor J said.
“Whilst it might be thought that pursuing those 37 matters is ambitious enough, it is apparent that does not accurately encompass the scope of Ms Sheikh’s application and ambitions.”
For example, she requested that all 18 current Chancery judges sit en banc to set aside every Law Society intervention undertaken since 1974 and order the Law Society to pay £1.2bn in compensation to the solicitors involved, and also wanted the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal to prosecute the 50 Law Society presidents since 1974.
“In her documents, Ms Sheikh invokes ‘the Post Office Scandal’ and contends that ‘The Law Society’s Intervention Fraud is a miscarriage of justice more preposterous and more depraved than the Post Office Scandal’.
“It would appear that recent developments in the Post Office Scandal have triggered Ms Sheikh’s attempts to resurrect the cases decided against her and to widen the inquiry into all intervention cases.”
Mellor J added that Ms Sheikh alleged “a very wide-ranging conspiracy which embraces all the judges who have made decisions against her… all the counsel and solicitors involved in those decisions, including counsel and solicitors who acted on her behalf, as well as numerous others”.
To give her leave would “unleash a tidal wave of re-litigation and/or fresh litigation”. Every part of it would be an abuse of process, the judge held.
“Her conspiracy theories are pure fantasy yet involve allegations of the utmost seriousness which, applying section 42(3), I must not allow to be pursued.”
In a postscript, Mellor J said Ms Sheikh would accuse him of being part of the supposed conspiracy against her.
Whilst he was preparing the ruling, she started to email every clerk to a Chancery Division judge and, when he asked her not to, she replied: “Mr Justice Mellors [sic] was not a court but a public authority within the meaning of HRA who is in the course of violating my Convention rights… the judgment is most certainly going to be another false instrument and an instrument of money laundering.”
This “rather proves my point”, Mellor J observed.
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