Judge rules lawyer’s false claims about reading medicine at the university were ‘an isolated incident’ in a 20-year career
A barrister disbarred for lying about studying at the University of Oxford has been allowed to return to the profession after winning an appeal.
Anurag Mohindru KC, a criminal lawyer who defended Ben Stokes against affray charges in 2018, was banned from practising as a barrister last year over false claims on a CV.
The former chairman of Essex County Cricket Club claimed to have won a cricket blue in the 1990s while studying at the university when he applied for a tenancy at a London chambers in 2013.
Mr Mohindru, 51, was disbarred by the Barristers’ Tribunal Service in 2025, but the High Court has now overturned it after ruling his lies were “an isolated incident”.
The barrister was applying for a tenancy at 23 Essex Street Chambers in 2012 when he told interviewers that he had read biomedical science at Oxford.
When asked whether he had won a blue, the sporting honour given to athletes who represent the university in varsity competitions against Cambridge, Mr Mohindru said he had in cricket.
He subsequently sent a CV to the chambers, claiming he read medicine at Oxford between 1993 and 1994.
CV ‘bolstered lie’
The court heard that Mr Mohindru studied for A-levels at d’Overbroeck’s, a private school in Oxford. He went on to study medicine at St George’s University in the United States in the 1990s before completing a postgraduate bar training course at the University of the West of England in Bristol in 2004.
At last year’s tribunal, Mr Mohindru denied “knowingly” providing false information and said he was “certain” he had not sent a CV submitted as evidence.
However, in his High Court appeal he accepted he had been dishonest, instead arguing that his disbarment was an excessively harsh punishment.
Mr Justice Johnson ruled that the CV was “created after the interview to bolster the false statement made in the interview” and “bolstered the initial lie” told by Mr Mohindru during the interview.
The judge added that the revelation of Mr Mohindru’s dishonesty may have been an act of “malice” that followed a “personal dispute” between him and a solicitor who was married to a member of the panel which interviewed him at 23 Essex Street.
Two lies an ‘isolated incident’
The dishonesty first emerged in an anonymous complaint to the Bar Standards Board made in 2021.
Mr Justice Johnson said: “In the context of a career spanning 20 years, the two lies within a short space of time, possibly less than 24 hours, can properly be regarded as an isolated incident.”
He added: “The public is capable of understanding the difference between a practitioner who has recently acted dishonestly, or whose dishonesty forms part of a continuing pattern, and one whose misconduct occurred many years ago, has not been repeated, and whose subsequent conduct has demonstrated a sustained record of integrity.
“In such a case, public confidence may be maintained by a sanction which marks the gravity of the dishonesty without permanently excluding the practitioner from the profession.”
The judge quashed Mr Mohindru’s disbarment and replaced it with a suspension, which ended on Tuesday. It means the barrister can now return to the profession.
Source: Telegraph
