Tim Robinson speaks to his fans!

gloucs | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday November 17, 2004 10:05 by Stella Hender hatton.hack at bristolsatire dot fsnet dot co dot uk

Tim Robinson, recently released from his 7 year sentence for being the boss of his \"fraudulent\" law firm, is sending his case to the CCRC with a view to getting an Appeal court. Today he sent this letter to various newspapers.

The Editor
Gloucestershire Echo
Cheltenham

Dear Madam,

Now that the dust has settled, I would be grateful if you would allow me to amplify and correct some inaccuracies in your reporting of my case. The Judge\'s scandalous decision to prevent reporting of this case for nearly 5 years has meant that a lot of detail has been lost. The public has every right to know what has gone on in their name, in secret.

I am sure that it will not be lost on your readers that two of the most eminent Queens Counsel in the land (both of whom sit as Judges in the Crown Court) independently described my case as. \"a witch hunt\" and as the \"longest and biggest farce in English legal history\". On any basis the trial was an obscene blot on the face of Justice. It never was, and was never intended to be, a search for the truth. Every trick (dirty or otherwise) in the book was employed to achieve their ambition - of taking me out of the game. As the officer in charge of the case tacitly admitted after the case, they were out to get me. Get me they did. It is, however, astonishing that even he has no idea what the cost of getting me was. Conservative estimates put the cost at around £50 million - the probable real cost is much nearer £90 million. Those figures encapsulate the real problems in this case. There was no budget, no control and no accountability. Like the Mounties, the Serious Fraud Office and Gloucestershire Constabulary simply had to get their man. It mattered not a jot to them (or regrettably to the Judge) that thoroughly guilty people got off scott free. I was their target and they had to get me by fair means or foul, at whatever the cost might be to local ratepayers and taxpayers.

Both the SFO and the Police had their own agendas. They were unhappy bedfellows, united in a common cause. The SFO regarded the Police as incompetent country bumpkins with a history of messing up important cases. The Police looked on the SFO as arrogant, out-of-touch, aloof city slickers living in an ivory tower. Both sides were right. The SFO at the time was on its knees. It had suffered a disastrous string of high profile failures - there were calls in The House of Commons for it to be abolished - and even the Metropolitan Police refused to send their cases to it. They simply had to win my case -hence the total disregard for the cost of the case. 120 police officers, 1000 clients interviewed and 3000 statements taken all failed to obtain one jot of evidence that I had ever made a false or improper claim to the Legal Aid Board - an utterly chaotic, defective, dysfunctional quango which was abolished when it became clear that it was not capable of being run sensibly. Minute examination of each of the tens of thousands of claims I had made in the last 10 years failed to show even one false or improper claim. So they had to rely on the tarnished evidence of the likes of Richard Hill and his sister in law Margaret Leith - both of whom showed that they were prepared to say anything about anyone, even the dead, to save their own necks. But the Police had a problem with Hill. Unknown to anyone except senior police officers, Hill had been secretly recruited to act for years as a paid informant on thousands of his clients. It is difficult to imagine a more serious breach of duty by Hill or a more grave perversion of the course of justice by the police. It is the only known case of the Police planting an informant in a law office to obtain confidential, legally-protected secrets. \"Anything goes\" was the police motto in this case. To hell with the rules-we\'ll bend them to get him. Bend them they most certainly did, from start to finish.

When the Judge, in a secret hearing (open justice?!!), ordered the Police to reveal to the Defence that Hill was a paid official informant, they didn\'t do so. That fact only emerged many months later during his evidence when the police handed out the wrong form. They claimed that they had \"overlooked\" such a minor, insignificant matter! Hill promptly denied being an informer and the Judge had to tell the Jury that he had seen all the papers and that Hill was indeed a paid informer. He told the Jury that Hill\'s lies and denial (which of course was blatant perjury on oath) was \"understandable\". Hill and Leith had initially been regarded by the Prosecution as \"not witnesses of truth\", but as the case went on it became obvious to everyone in court that any evidence (however flawed) was better than none at all. The extreme measures taken by the Police, with total disregard to the inherent illegality of their behaviour, include secret CCTV surveillance of our offices for 6 months (which revealed nothing except the hard work and long hours worked by most of the staff), and entering our offices in the middle of the night with Hill and using our photocopier to copy our legally-privileged client papers, which must render the convictions of hundreds of clients as suspect at the very least, having been obtained by totally illegal and unlawful means. As the case was being prepared, a succession of past and present clients streamed into our offices complaining that they had been bullied, pressured and threatened by the police to make statements against us. Some were promised that charges would be dropped if they \"co-operated\". In several cases charges were inexplicably dropped, and a lot of police files certainly seemed to go missing at that time.

Your coverage of the case does not reveal that the case against our Practice Manager, who prepared daily and weekly financial reports for the Partners, and who they said must have known of an endemic fraud, was dropped when he courageously refused to incriminate me.They realized that prosecuting him as well as me would lesson their chances of getting me. They made it quite plain to his team that it was me they were after. All the staff who processed the legal aid claim forms were never even charged. The partners in charge of and responsible for financial matters were acquitted. My dedicated Personal Assistant for over 20 years was not even charged. She knows the truth and remains loyal to this day.

I was interviewed over 6 days at Stroud Police Station. The Police very kindly tipped off the Press on each occasion to ensure I had a good welcome. The transcripts of the interviews ran to approx 2000 foolscap pages. I was able to rebut every allegation made against me. The vast majority of staff interviewed there asserted their total innocence. So why was there, after a delay of some years, such an unseemly rush to plead guilty by so many? The answer is intensely worrying. After I was convicted and sentenced - to longer than the average robber, rapist or heroin dealer, the Judge let it be known that to save time and money, any clerk pleading guilty would not be sent to prison. Thoroughly decent, hard-working and committed clerks who had seen what had happened to me felt, quite rightly, that they could not take the risk of being sent to prison if a jury was influenced again by the thespian skills of the Prosecution team, allowed to do as they pleased by a tame Judge. Most of those who pleaded guilty openly say that they did so only for that reason. Who can blame them? It is a shocking example of justice being perverted by the Judge holding a gun to their heads. It also happens to be a bad example of plea-bargaining, frowned on by the Appeal Court but steadfastly ignored when it suits them.

My firm, over the 10 years involved, was advised on financial matters by Grant Thornton, one of the largest and most highly-regarded firms of Chartered Accountants in the country. They did a superb job and their advice was accepted and acted upon without exception. Their senior National tax partner, Mike Warburton, was called as a witness by the Prosecution. He said that my dealings with him over that 10 year period had been \"truthful and honest\" and that I had run the firm as a business should be run. He also confirmed that for 5 years after the original firm had been forced into closure, I had practiced in Gloucester and Cheltenham with substantially the same staff, and that the firm\'s exceptional profitability had been maintained if not enhanced, despite every single claim being examined with a fine toothcomb. The idiotic notion that the firm was profitable only by fraud was thereby exploded. This evidence destroyed the central plank of the Crown\'s case, but the Judge side-stepped it neatly by telling the Jury that he didn\'t understand that evidence and urged them to ignore it. Your report that the firm was not permitted to advise on green forms is inaccurate. It was, and it did, at all times.

Many ironies arose during the trial. In the period 1985-1995 green form abuse was rife throughout the profession nationally. It was so easy and simple and so difficult to detect and prevent that I, as a major player, was asked by the Legal Aid Board for my suggestions to eradicate the opportunity to abuse the Scheme. I gave that advice and suggested changes to their forms, which were implemented. The Crown did not seek to contradict that evidence. I would hardly have helped to prevent abuse, or sack a number of my staff caught fiddling, if I had been involved in it myself. But the real irony is that in this case concerning allegations of abusing legal aid, one of the barristers involved in the case claimed to be a slow reader and took (so he said) 700 hours to read the case papers! Another stretched the Regulations to the limit (and beyond) by turning up for just 10 minutes some days, which entitled him to claim a whole day\'s fee. Another bought 2 racehorses, a new BMW and a large extension to his palatial country house out of his excessive fees. But the most shocking example of the greed and avarice of barristers was the pressure put on one clerk by his barrister to plead not guilty, when he had admitted to the police that he had invented hundreds of false claims for his own benefit as he was in serious debt. He had no defence and would not have been sent to prison if he had pleaded guilty. But his barrister was only interested in the massive fee involved in a trial lasting many months, so the clerk was convicted and went to prison whilst the despicable barrister laughed all the way to the bank. That sort of vile hypocrisy and self-interest is the main reason why, as the Home Office confirms, some 50% of the Legal Aid bill is spent on 1% of Crown Court cases.

To get me, they had to show that others were involved in legal aid fraud, and that I knew or should have known what they were up to, and that I knowingly went along with it, even if (as in some cases), I wasn\'t even in the country at the time. An illuminating example of the Police approach was when a lady solicitor employed by the firm was arrested in a drunken rage after a punch-up with her boyfriend\'s secret lover. In her desire to do him down, she blurted out that he was involved in legal aid fraud and that the evidence was on his desk in the Gloucester office. I knew only that she had been arrested for assault on this woman. The following day I spent 3 hours with the Head of the C.I.D. pleading on her behalf that she should not be charged with assault. Not a word was revealed to me about her allegations and I only learnt of them 3 years later. If I had been told, then, what she had said, an immediate investigation would have taken place and if what she had said had even a grain of truth in it, then the offender would have been dismissed there and then. By keeping this information to themselves, the Police enabled this individual to carry on with his dishonest activities for 5 years. I was brought up to believe that the primary duty of the Police was to prevent crime, not to encourage or condone it.

On reflection, I accept that I have paid a very heavy price for incurring the wrath of the Establishment. I pioneered and introduced business methods which were pretty novel at the time but are now commonplace throughout the profession. My techniques of pro-active defending and harrying the other side into error and mistake infuriated police forces up and down the country. I am intensely proud of my firm\'s reputation as fearless defenders who could not be got at. Our record of success in terms of results speaks for itself. It is without parallel. But what I am most proud of, and ironically what motivated them to destroy the firm, was my determination that unlike the medical and other state-funded professions, all our clients, from High Court Judges and Pillars of Society to the lowest of the low, should at all times receive the same Rolls Royce service regardless of rank, station, colour or creed. No one was ever turned away and we provided that quality service, day and night, 365 days a year. It was no accident or surprise that we became known as the Rolls Royce of solicitors. Of course we made very many powerful enemies by refusing to be silenced when we came across serious police malpractice or by using the appeal processes persistently, to put right offensive and unfair decisions in the courts. In short, we worked as hard as humanly possible for those who chose us to represent them. We didn\'t take prisoners and didn\'t expect any favours, but we never thought for a moment that they would do as they did, at such an incredibly outrageous cost to the public purse.

But I have bad news for them. Yes, they did bamboozle a gullible, carefully selected jury. I foolishly thought that 26 commendations from senior Judges, 35 years of unblemished professional service and my record of handling £700million of clients\' money without a penny going missing would stand me in good stead. A senior CPS lawyer, who said that from his knowledge and experience of me that it was \"inconceivable\" that I was guilty, was in a much better position than any juror to assess the quality and honesty of my work. But even being described by a senior Magistrate as \"a model solicitor\" counted for nothing. They did intimidate the partisan Judge (who I described in a letter to you many years ago as \"weak and spineless\"). Their lies, half-truths, distortions and smears did win the day and the Court of Appeal did its usual trick of burying its head in the sand as it has done with very many high profile (but much less expensive) cases. Hopefully, one day, when that court is reformed, it will be much more keen to correct outrageous and blatant injustices rather than pretending that all is fine and dandy within what everyone knows is the deeply flawed system of criminal justice. Prisons by their nature are not pleasant places and my time there was hard to endure. I am sure that I would not have been able to do so without the unwavering love and support of my family and friends, many of whom know where the truth lies. I have served my sentence. Those who know me will not be surprised to know that my conduct in prison was described as \"exemplary\". I was, rather surprisingly, released on parole at the earliest opportunity, despite my constant protestations of innocence. I have had tremendous support from many in the profession and from some police officers (many of whom are former clients), who know what has happened but cannot speak out for fear of victimization. I have learnt a great deal by attending a course at Gloscat every day in the last year of my incarceration, where the tutors demonstrated their great skill and dedication in teaching me and others the mysteries and artistry involved in producing quality food.

The bad news for them, but good news for anyone interested in truth and justice, is that in the last week or so, it has been brought to my attention by a completely independent source, that very serious misconduct occurred before and during the trial which is likely to render my conviction invalid. Every defendant (even me) is entitled under the European Convention of Human Rights (Article 5) to a trial by a fair and independent tribunal. That I most certainly did not receive. Accordingly I have instructed my lawyers to lodge the papers with a view to my conviction being reconsidered by the Appeal Court (and then the European Court) in the light of the fresh evidence now available. I do not suppose the Prosecution team is overjoyed by this information leaking out - but watch this space for further developments. You might even get another 24 page pull-out supplement out of this case!!

Yours truly



Tim Robinson