Legal Cheek
A former head of legal at BNP Paribas has been fined £15,000 by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal after admitting that calling his bosses “c***s” and his underlings “mad” and “autistic” breached SRA Principles.
The tribunal heard how Benedict Foster “created and/or used” inappropriate nicknames for his colleagues which included “Mad Paul”, “Pol Pot”, “The idiot”, “Jabba the Hutt”, “The Twittering Fool”, and “Hu She” for an Asian employee.
The solicitor was also prosecuted for several emails sent during the pandemic.
In them he referred to senior colleagues as a “bunch of cunts”, signed off with “Fuck knows”, sent two which just said “What the fuck is this?” and “Looks like a bunch of cock”, and sent another asking if an individual was autistic.
Other nicknames he gave colleagues included “Biryani”, “The Candidate”, “The Black Swan”, “Dr No”, “Boomerang Jack”, “The Sleeping Giant”, “The International Hair”, “Les Miserables”, “Bryan Ferry”, “Scaramanga”, “Moomintroll”, “Knick-Knack”, “Corporal Jones” and “Mr Incredible”. At least he was having fun with it.
Foster, who qualified in 1988 and was head of the London Debt and Equity Capital Markets team in 2021 when he embarked on his naming odyssey, denied there was any racism or misogyny in his comic works.
He explained that the actual name of the woman he nicknamed ‘Hu She’ was pronounced ‘Who-ee Who-ah”, and his nickname was based on that and the running ‘Who He?’ joke in Private Eye, as he had never met her.
But he admitted his choice could be interpreted as ridiculing a traditional Chinese name and was “derogatory and unprofessional”.
He also accepted that nicknaming a French lawyer working in his team “Mad Paul” was inappropriate and offensive. As were the other monikers, even though their owners were not aware of them, and even if they had shared his sense of humour.
“Mad Paul” certainly didn’t: after Foster conducted his exit interview, he reported him to the bank.
BNP Paribas initially cleared Foster, but when the press reported on his colourful emails it re-opened its investigation. However, before a follow up internal hearing could be conducted, BNP Paribas “negotiated an exit”, and Foster was subsequently reported to the SRA.
Foster admitted that he had breached SRA principles by sending emails which saw him acting unprofessionally, acting without integrity and failing to encourage “equality, diversity and inclusion”.
However, in mitigation Foster’s barrister said he was in fact a “champion of diversity” and emphasised that he didn’t “have a racist bone in his body”. He said the emails had all been sent during the stressful time of the pandemic, when pressure was exacerbated by structural changes taking place at the bank.
As well as fining him £15k, the SDT ordered him to pay £16,000 of the SRA’s costs.
A witness in the case told ROF that Foster appeared to have “received a volume discount for his lists of insults” and was “lucky not to have been a junior lawyer who had left documents on a train, the consequences could have otherwise been much more serious”.
Do you have a hundred nicknames for your peers? Put them in the comments and see if they make it past the ROF censor.
