Ronald Olden (Claimant/Appellant) v Bishop and Light Solicitors
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Lord Justice Vos |
| Judgment Date | 27 January 2016 |
| Neutral Citation | [2016] EWCA Civ 201 |
| Date | 27 January 2016 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
| Docket Number | B2/2014/1535/1536/3067/3069 |
[2016] EWCA Civ 201
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM SWANSEA CIVIL
AND FAMILY JUSTICE CENTRE
(HIS HONOUR JUDGE VOSPER QC)
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand
London, WC2A 2LL
Lord Justice Vos
B2/2014/1535/1536/3067/3069
The Claimant/Appellant appeared in person
The Defendant/Respondent did not appear and was not represented
Introduction
This is the renewed oral application for permission to appeal the decisions of His Honour Judge Vosper QC dated 4 April 2015 and the subsequent associated costs orders. The judge heard two cases together. Those cases became known as the Swansea proceedings and the Darlington proceedings.
The Darlington proceedings, which are most relevant to the application before me this afternoon, concerned a series of allegations of negligence and breach of fiduciary duty made against the appellant's erstwhile criminal solicitors, Bishop & Light, and Mr Kevin Light in particular.
The claims related to the solicitors' alleged failure to carry out instructions from the appellant so as to obtain the return of a Shogun motor car and of £5,000 in cash that had been seized from the appellant by the police and to lift a restraint order imposed on the appellant after his convictions for mortgage fraud were overturned on something of a technicality concerning the lawfulness of his arrest, and for the return of certain private fees paid to those solicitors during the currency of a criminal legal aid certificate.
The Swansea proceedings were a claim for damages arising from the solicitors' handling of the criminal proceedings and in particular their alleged failure to request a preliminary hearing as to the legality of the appellant's arrest and as to the admissibility of certain documents.
Both sets of proceedings were entirely unsuccessful and the appellant was ordered on a further occasion in June 2014 to pay the solicitors' costs of them.
I need not go into the history of this lengthy matter in this short judgment because His Honour Judge Vosper has done so in his judgment. Moreover, the four appellant's notices before this court have already been dealt with on paper by Longmore LJ in a decision dated 27 January 2015. In that order, Longmore LJ dismissed all the applications for permission to appeal as totally without merit, save for the appeals proposed on two discrete issues. The effect, therefore, of Longmore LJ's order is to mean that the appellant is not permitted to renew orally any of the applications that were declared to be totally without merit. Longmore LJ's order made it crystal clear which parts were not totally without merit as follows:
"All the complaints apart from those supported by counsel in his advice of 14th March 2014 … are totally without merit and may not be orally renewed. The only grounds which may be orally renewed are, therefore, the decision about the wrongly charged fees and the failure promptly to apply for a discharge of the restraint order."
It is therefore to those matters, and to those matters alone, that I now turn to examine whether, contrary to Longmore LJ's view, the appellant has established that appeals on the question of the failure promptly to apply for a discharge of the restraint order and/or the wrongly charged fees have a real prospect of success.
I should say at this stage that the paperwork filed by the appellant now amounts to some eight large files of documents and is, I am afraid to say, wholly excessive, disproportionate and oppressive. The volume seems designed, I would say, to obfuscate, rather than to clarify, the issues and has made the resolution of this application far more time consuming for the court than it needed to be. The way the applications have been put forward has itself been an abuse of the processes of the court, as Longmore LJ said. Still further, lengthy documents have been put in in purported support of this renewed oral application. These do not confine themselves to the points in issue on the application and I have not therefore found many parts of the documentation of any assistance.
The salient facts are very simple, namely that the appellant was arrested for mortgage fraud, was made the subject of a restraint order in respect of his assets, was convicted and sentenced to 4 years in prison but was then released when his appeal was successful on 9 March 2007. At that point, no application was made to the High Court to discharge the restraint order apparently because an appeal to the House of Lords was contemplated but ultimately it was discharged and replaced by a civil freezing order to the same effect, supporting civil proceedings to confiscate the appellant's assets obtained from the proceeds of the alleged fraud.
On the first of the two relevant points, the judge decided in the Darlington proceedings, at paragraphs 116 to 126 of his judgment, that it was not negligent for the solicitors to have decided to negotiate with the ARA (Asset Recovery Agency) rather than applying to the court. The appellant's evidence that he had not agreed to a consent order was unconvincing and, moreover, by the...
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