CURSE OF GNOME
EVER since he dared threaten to injunct the Eye's Paul Foot Awards last autumn
(see Eye 1250), bent solicitor Jami Tehrani has been fleeing the awesome fury
of the Curse of Gnome. But he was dicing with doom long before.
Tehrani worked for Dean & Dean, the bent law firm befriended by
Keith Vaz,
chairman of the supposedly respectable Commons home affairs committee. It made
its name defending the bent copper Ali Dizaei, and played the race card by
accusing the Met of the "racist bullying" of its immoral client. Yet until now,
pinning accusations of misconduct on him has proved difficult - and not only
because everyone associated with Dean & Dean shouted "racist" at their many
accusers.
Whenever the courts or the legal regulators found against Dean & Dean, Tehrani
appealed. The tactic allowed Tehrani and Shahrokh Mireskandari, his accomplice
at Dean & Dean, to harass critics. The judges of last year's Foot Award could
not honour the brilliant investigation into Dizaei, Vaz and Dean & Dean by
Stephen Wright and Richard Pendlebury of the Mail without defaming him, he
insisted. because he and Mireskandari remained innocent of all complaints
against them in the eyes of the law.
The law's patience is now running out.
As the Eye reported in November, the Romanian company Angel Airlines won a
bankruptcy order against Tehrani. He was personally liable for £140,000 of
£300,000 it said Dean & Dean owed the firm for overcharging for its legal
services.
Dean & Dean had represented the airline against BAE Systems. The case was
settled out of court. with BAE agreeing to pay Angel $500,000 [approx.
£350,000]. However, Dean & Dean then presented Angel Airlines with a
staggering bill of around £444,000. In a direct intervention in the
process. Vaz wrote to the high court on of his friends and, inevitably, implied
that it was racist for judges to hold an "ethnic-minority firm solicitors"
to account. Nevertheless, Angel
Airlines duly won its bankruptcy order and Tehrani duly appealed.
No surprise there; but when the case came back to court at the end of January,
Mr Justice Floyd heard that Tehrani had launched 26 previous appeals in the
supreme court costs office, the high court and the court of appeal, and had lost
every one. Unpaid costs orders against him totalled £360,000.
As he listened to the account of serial stalling something inside the judge
snapped. He told Tehrani that if he wanted the appeal to go ahead, he must pay
Angel Airlines' liquidators £19,000 up front as security for costs by Friday 26
February. "I think that in the light of all the history of this litigation the
time has come for Mr Tehrani to put his money where his mouth is," the judge
said.
In scenes which would have brought a tear to the most jaundiced eye, Tehrani
tried to resist the demand to shell out by pleading poverty. He said that
although he and his wife had sold their home in Somerset for £1.85m two years
ago, the estate agents' fees were £50,000, he had used £150,000 to pay other
debts and that the rest of the money had gone on living expenses. The judge was
having none of it. There is "little or no detail what has happened to the
proceeds," he said. "It seems to me a reasonable inference that Mr Tehrani
retains some of that money."
Within a fortnight of Mr Justice Floyd's ruling, Southwark crown court convicted
Dean & Dean's former client Commander Dizaei of misconduct and perverting the
course of justice after he assaulted and tried to frame an Iraqi-born web
designer who said he owed him money, and sent him down for four years.
Meanwhile, if Tehrani fails to pay the money up front, or if he does pay money up
front and loses his appeal, the courts will lift the stay on the bankruptcy
order, the legal authorities will ban him from working as a solicitor and the
blood-drenched Curse of Gnome will have claimed yet another victim.
Look on its works, ye mighty, and despair.