The Bar Standards Board has taken the decision to disbar Tariq Rehman of Kings Court Chambers in Birmingham. You can Google them if you want but I am not linking to them. Mr Rehman is understood to have been involved with other immigration firms in the past and has also recently been trading as KC Chambers.

The decision to disbar Mr Rehman means he will no longer be allowed to practice as a barrister. This latest decision comes following a string of decisions by regulators concerning Mr Rehman.

In 2014 the Legal Ombudsman took the unprecedented step of “naming and shaming” Mr Rehman in order to protect the public. At that time the chair of the Ombudsman’s board, Steve Green said:

His standards of service, often during crucial immigration cases, are consistently poor; requiring Ombudsman intervention time after time. He is a risk to any potential new clients and we want to exercise our powers now to make sure people are aware of the risks before instructing him to work for them in future.

More recently, Mr Rehman was suspended with immediate effect for 14 months and barred from accepting public access instructions for three years by a disciplinary tribunal on 2 November 2014. This followed delays in Mr Rehman paying refunds or compensation to clients after being ordered to do so by the Legal Ombudsman.

The separate decision to disbar Mr Rehman is based on a cumulative assessment of all these separate disciplinary proceedings as well as further irregularities said to have been found when the BSB sent in an inspection team to Kings Court Chambers.

Speaking following the decision to disbar, Sara Jagger, the director of professional conduct at the Bar Standards Board said:

The tribunal’s decision to disbar Mr Rehman reflects the need to protect the public from his serious and persistent failures in this case and in the cases decided previously.

The decision to disbar is normally open to appeal and Mr Rehman has quite a history of pursuing appeals against disciplinary findings. These appeals often seem to allege various wide ranging conspiracies against Mr Rehman. See for example Rehman v The Bar Standards Board [2016] EWHC 2023 (Admin), in which Mr Justice Hickinbottom patiently records the various conspiracy allegations against himself and others. As with the disciplinary hearings, Mr Rehman did not attend the hearing nor did he instruct a representative to attend the hearing.

I say “normally” open to appeal. At the conclusion of that case Mr Hickinbottom made an Extended Civil Restraint Order against Mr Rehman which prevents him bringing any proceedings against the Bar Standards Board or the Legal Ombudsman without permission. Perhaps this really is the end of the road for Mr Rehman.

Given the sheer number of findings against Mr Rehman over a protracted period of time, the vulnerability of the clients represented by him, the irreparable consequences of messing up many immigration cases and the fact he must have represented at least hundreds of clients during that time, one is left wondering if the regulators are up to the task of dealing with really determined repeat offenders.

Thankfully, such situations seem rarely to arise at present. Deregulation may change that.