A barrister that purposefully served his own divorce papers to the wrong address has lost an appeal challenging his disbarring at the High Court.
Barrister, Ehi Ukiwa, was able to obtain a divorce on fraudulent grounds after he deliberately gave a court an incorrect address for his wife, enabling a person other than his wife to sign the divorce papers.
Ukiwa was consequently disbarred by The Bar Tribunals and Adjudication Services in 2020 after the court found that he was responsible for four charges of professional misconduct.
In his appeal at the High Court, Ukiwa argued that the tribunal misdirected itself and made a serious procedural error by departing from the finding of a court on the matter. He argued that the approach at tribunal was “against the requirements of natural justice and inconsistent with established authorities”.
In the High Court, Mrs Justice Collins Rice was however satisfied that no jurisdictional error had occurred. She stated that Ukiwa had been given a proper and fair hearing, and that if the decision was taken to re-start the fact-finding process and could be described as irregular, there was no argument that it was unjust.
“It was from start to finish an exercise in going the extra mile to ensure that Mr Ukiwa was not subjected to prejudice or unfairness in the proceedings before it”,
Mrs Justice Collins Rice said.
It was concluded that because both a family and tribunal judge had established that Ukiwa had supplied the wrong address to the family court and that there was a clear link between that address and his wife’s forged signature, that fraud had been proven.
“The address could not have been an honest mistake because no mistaken recipient would have known the wife’s signature, copied it, and filed the acknowledgment of service at court. They found the fraud proven on these facts alone”,
she said.
