Legal Futures on the Shiner case
There has been a strong reaction to the suspended prison sentence for disgraced solicitor Phil Shiner, with the shadow Lord Chancellor saying “it is an insult to British veterans that he is not behind bars”.
Robert Jenrick explained on X: “Phil Shiner’s bogus claims destroyed the lives of so many British soldiers for years. Along the way he defrauded the taxpayer of hundreds of thousands of pounds.”
His Honour Judge Hehir at Southwark Crown Court said that, because Mr Shiner has “already suffered professional and personal ruin… I do not consider it necessary to add to that by sending you straight to prison”.
Former MP and veterans affairs minister Johnny Mercer wrote on X that he referred Mr Shiner to the National Crime Agency for prosecution back in 2017.
Describing the struck-off solicitor as “a modern day traitor”, he went on: “He paid fixers to generate evidence of industrial levels of abuse from the British Army in Iraq, made millions of pounds in the process, and has now been convicted of fraud. In the process he destroyed the lives of some of our finest veterans…
“That you receive a suspended sentence for committing a multi-million pound fraud but go to jail for posting something on Facebook, says all you need to know about this Country at the moment.”
The amount of legal aid Mr Shiner was convicted over was actually £200,000, although the work done with it it led to him obtaining a legal aid contract worth £3m.
Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat tweeted simply “Traitor”, while many former members of the armed forces took to social media to express disgust at the lenience of the sentence.
An editorial in The Sun called Mr Shiner “a wicked crook, a thief and a liar”, adding: “Incredibly, although Shiner pleaded guilty to fraud, a judge spared him jail because the offences were ‘a long time ago’.
“And so a conman who spent years lying about miscarriages of justice was yesterday the wholly undeserved beneficiary of one.”
Hilary Meredith-Beckham, whose eponymous Manchester law firm Hilary Meredith Solicitors represents veterans falsely accessed of brutality and abuses against Iraqi civilians, attended the sentencing alongside two of them Brian Wood and Bob Campbell.
In light of Mr Shiner’s conviction, she called on the government to apologise to those falsely accused and put in place a financial redress scheme.
“As a result of Shiner’s criminal conduct, thousands of British soldiers were falsely and maliciously accused of war crimes. He instigated a witch hunt based on deceit. The accusations against British troops were totally false, and Shiner illegally pocketed millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money pursuing them.
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“A modern-day traitor” – politicians’ disgust at failure to jail Shiner
