Caught out.
A “brilliantly successful’ KC who fibbed to an interview panel about studying at Oxford University and being a really good cricketer had been disbarred.
Anu Mohindru, who was a member of Foundry Chambers and who was also, until this week, the chairman of Essex County Cricket Club, faced two charges of professional misconduct for falsely claiming that he studied medicine at Oxford University and that he was a qualified doctor.
When the barrister, blessed with a “voice like silk” according to one testimonial, applied to join 23 Essex Street chambers in 2013 he told the interviewers that he had studied medicine at Oxford University and repeated the claim in his CV.
He also said he had played cricket for the bar, Lashings Cricket Club and the MCC, and that he was a cricketing blue having represented Oxford in a varsity match against Cambridge.
His boasts about his prowess on the wicket proved his undoing. Two of his interviewers were “keen cricketers”, and “something about his account” gave them “doubts about what he was saying”, said the prosecutor at his Bar Standards Board tribunal.
When they dug into his CV after the interview, their suspicions grew. “Rather unusually”, his CV stated he had spent only one year at Oxford University, from 1993 to 1994, and it also did not list his college.
After a “heated” phone call with Mohindru, he withdrew his application.
They followed up with the university and the medical school Mohindru claimed to have attended, and discovered that neither “had any record” of him.
BSB tribunal chair Nicholas Ainley said Mohindru had told the interviewers a “reckless, foolish and completely unnecessary lie” about studying at Oxford and “doubled down’ in his CV.
Clearing him of the second charge that he had claimed to be a doctor, Ainley said that “with genuine regret we find the first charged to be proved”.
In mitigation, Mark Harries KC said Mohindru had made a “gross error of judgment” that had been “unsophisticated, utterly foolish and unnecessary” and which had “come back to haunt him”.
“The contribution that [Mohindru] has made to the bar … arguably outweighs the damage to the reputation of the profession that’s been caused now by the revelation of his dishonesty 12 years ago”, he said.
Mohindru has had to sell his house and was living in accommodation provided by the school where his wife works as a teacher, and he also had a “looming tax bill that he cannot pay”.
But the tribunal chair said it was “impossible” to find that the silk’s mitigating circumstances outweighed his wrongdoing and ordered him to be disbarred.
It didn’t help that the silk had pleaded not guilty. “We cannot exclude from consideration that he denied the charges – he’s entitled to do that, but he invoked allegations of far more serious dishonesty against others”, said Ainley.
Mohindru must pay the BSB’s costs of £54,780, and on Sunday he also stood down as a board member of Essex County Cricket Club “with immediate effect”.
In a statement the club said it “would like to place on record its thanks to Anu for his leadership and significant contribution during his time as Chair of the Club”.
A spokesperson for Foundry Chambers hopped over the awkward fact of his tenancy and said, “The allegations relate to conduct over 12 years ago before he joined chambers. We have no further comment”.