Who is alexander mercouris wife

Alexander Mercouris engaged in conduct likely to diminish public confidence in the legal profession or the administration of justice or otherwise bring the legal profession into disrepute, contrary to paragraph 301(a)(iii) in that on 28 October 2009 you purported to obtain a statement from H that was not a true document and you knew was not a true document and you had not had any contact with H.

Alexander Mercouris engaged in conduct likely to diminish public confidence in the legal profession or the administration of justice or otherwise bring the legal profession into disrepute, contrary to paragraph 301(a)(iii) in that you instructed J not to attend an appeal hearing in relation to a purported dispute with Westminster City Council on the basis that you were negotiating with Westminster City Council when no such negotiation was being conducted and you knew that no negotiation was being conducted.

Alexander Mercouris engaged in conduct likely to diminish public confidence in the legal profession or the administration of justice or otherwise bring the legal profession into disrepute, contrary to paragraph 301(a)(iii) in that you stated that you would be making an application to the Court for an interim payment of ?50,000 when you knew that no such application had been made or was going to be made.

Alexander Mercouris engaged in conduct likely to diminish public confidence in the legal profession or the administration of justice or otherwise bring the legal profession into disrepute, contrary to paragraph 301(a)(iii) in that you claimed that ?983,000, a settlement by Westminster City Council in favour of J, had been stolen by your brother.

Alexander Mercouris engaged in conduct likely to diminish public confidence in the legal profession or the administration of justice or otherwise bring the legal profession into disrepute, contrary to section 301(a)(iii) in that you purported in a statement dated 11 December 2009 that you had been detained by bogus police officers and taken to a meeting at the Royal Courts of Justice where P a senior law lord tried to bribe you to drop a legal case in return for a payment to you of ?50,000 plus payment of your debts and mortgage knowing that this did not happen and dishonestly claiming that it did.

The Telegraph revealed in 2016 that Mr Mercouris was disbarred after a Bar Standards Board disciplinary tribunal found he had brought the profession into disrepute with his handling of her damages claim against Westminster Council over the care of her son Tariq.

The local authority offered the beautician £5,000 to settle, but Mr Mercouris falsely told her he had managed to win her £983,000 in compensation, prompting her to borrow money and go on holiday in anticipation of the windfall.

The Bar Standards Board heard that when the cash failed to materialise, Mercouris “embarked on ever more bizarre assertions to hide the truth”. These included fabricating a letter from Lady Hale, the then Deputy President of the Supreme Court, expressing concern about the near £1 million payment not having been made by Westminster.

Mr Mercouris also claimed he had been detained by bogus police officers and taken to a meeting with Lord Phillips, then President of the Supreme Court, and offered £50,000 to drop the claim. 

An investigation into Mr Mercouris by the Met Police was closed after officers decided there was not enough evidence to bring a criminal case against him.

Following a complaint by Ms Jamous the case was reopened and Mr Mercouris was again interviewed under caution.

But in August 2012 the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided there was insufficient evidence to bring a prosecution and he was released with no further action.

Mr Mercouris has since reinvented himself as commentator on Russian affairs and international politics on the RT channel.

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A beautician can sue a disgraced ex-barrister for £200,000 over claims his new TV career has left her anxious and depressed, a judge has ruled.

Lorna Jamous, 54, hired Alexander Mercouris in 2008 to bring a compensation claim against Westminster city council after her son was taken into care for a year.

She was offered a £5,000 settlement in 2009 but Mercouris, 55, persuaded her to reject it. He later claimed he had managed to get the sum increased to £983,000. When the money failed to materialise, he forged a letter from Baroness Hale — now a Supreme Court justice — saying she was concerned that the payment had not been made.

In a series of lies, he claimed the payout had been stolen by his brother and that he had been abducted by fake police officers and taken to a meeting with the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers. Mercouris said Lord Phillips had offered him £50,000 if he dropped the case, a Bar Standards Board tribunal heard in 2012.

He blamed his behaviour on a 2007 mental breakdown but was disbarred.

Mercouris has since reinvented himself as a commentator on world affairs for Russian TV news outlets and websites. Ms Jamous said she was alerted to his new career in March last year. She has filed a £200,000 compensation claim at the High Court, alleging she and her son were mentally scarred by his treatment of them.

This week Master Davison, sitting in the Queen’s Bench division, dismissed an attempt by Mercouris to have the case thrown out. The judge found Ms Jamous had a claim to bring and ordered a full trial to be heard this year, adding her son, now in his twenties, as a claimant.

Ms Jamous said: “It was outrageous, I couldn’t believe he was holding himself out as an expert on these shows. I have been fighting this case on my own and am pleased it will now go to trial.”

Guarang Naik, for Mercouris, said the ex-barrister was opposing the claim but added: “His conduct is not something that’s disputed.” He said Mercouris will argue his TV appearance cannot amount to causing personal injury because “all he has done is moved on with his life”.

Master Davison found Ms Jamous’s son suffers because Mercouris’s handling of the 2009 claim left him without a payout for therapy. He said through Mercouris’s “negligence, or worse than negligence” the son was deprived of “the psychiatric help he would have had”.

Ms Jamous’s claim of professional negligence against Mercouris was struck out as there is a three-year time limit on such cases. The personal injury claims will go to trial on a date to be decided.

I am constantly amazed at the number of lawyers I know.  Not the ones I’ve met through work - that wouldn’t be amazing at all - but it seems an awful lot of the people I went to school or university with or who I met in other jobs are now lawyers.  I can’t help wondering if there is enough legal work to go round.

More to the point, how is it that I know so many competitive type A personalities with sufficiently high regard for their own abilities that they became lawyers?  This isn’t just another opportunity for me to have another rant about lawyers and their superior attitude to non-lawyers:  it seems that having the sort of personality that makes you a good lawyer can also make you more prone  stress at work.

It is not so much a myth that some jobs are more stressful than others; rather the myth perpetrated concerns which jobs are the most stressful.  Being a hot shot city lawyer or a brain surgeon is no more stressful than being a bus driver or shop assistant if you love what you are doing.    In fact, the more menial and low quality the work, the more likely you are to be stressed or depressed, proving that not all work is good for your health.

The problem for many lawyers is not that their jobs are inherently stressful, but that they are not psychologically equipped for dealing with the stress when it hits them.  Occupational psychologists often argue that lawyers are relatively prone to depression because pessimists, people able to foresee problems, do better at law.

Lawyers are also problem solvers and see themselves as someone others come to for help making them prone to think they can sort themselves out without any help.  That, as anyone who has suffered from depression knows, is a recipe for disaster, because it serves to internalise all your angst until it spirals out of control, often to spectacular effect.

I had to chuckle at this piece by David Pannick QC in the Times last week, in which he described the sorry case of barrister Alexander Mercouris who concocted an ever more elaborate scenario to explain to his client why her settlement money had not appeared.  He was eventually struck off with the chairman of the tribunal describing it as a ‘sad case’ in which Mr Mercouris ‘went completely off the rails’.  Doubtless it probably wasn’t quite so amusing for his client.

As Pannick goes on to say, it is probably surprising that there aren’t more lawyers who have a mental breakdown given that their success, or otherwise, is usually measured by winning cases that may be unwinnable.  The hours many of them work in pursuit of working these miracles are criminal: when I worked in a law firm I often felt opprobrium from lawyers when I explained I only worked nine to five and could not, therefore, attend a meeting at 6.15 (pm or am) on a Wednesday.

According to a survey last year, ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning is the most stressful time of the working week with mounting pressures from the trivial to the significant causing one in three lawyers to cry.  Nothing wrong with a good cry, but probably not ideal if you have set your sights on partnership in a competitive and high-pressured environment.

The problem is so acute that lawyers have their very own charity to help them cope.  LawCare, set up to help struggling law professionals, has seen the number failing to cope rise notably in recent years, particularly since the economic downturn.  Its chief executive says a key problem is lawyers lacking support when they are struggling to handle their workload, afraid to raise their voice in case they jump to the top of the redundancy list.

She adds ‘Some partners live in blissful ignorance of what is going on around them [but] as a partner you have to make sure you are available and set time aside if someone wants to talk to you’.  I have to be honest, I can’t imagine anyone I’d have wanted to talk to less, but then I’m not a lawyer.

It was an interesting coincidence that immediately after coming across the Pannick article, I read about the Legal Services Board’s chairman David Edmonds telling lawyers to ‘get off their high horse about non lawyers’ impact on their ethics’.  You would expect me to agree with him that it is ‘demeaning’ to suggest non lawyers are less capable of ethical behaviour in business than lawyers.

As he says ‘I wager the title solicitor isn’t a good predictor of whether someone will act honestly or ethically' and  highlighted the sting of lawyer scandals to ensure people did not look 'backwards to traditional regulation through some sort of rose-tinted spectacles, dreaming of the time when professional ethics were consistently high and only jolly good chaps were able to practise law’

It strikes me this sense of superiority that still permeates the profession is the other side of the same coin that is causing more and more lawyers to suffer from stress and even, in the case of Mr Mercouris, driving them mad.

Bad news for the lawyers.  But equally as disturbing is the impact this could have on unsuspecting clients.  Because lawyers rarely let the professional mask slip, there really is no way of knowing if yours is about to crack up.  All you can realistically do is make sure you don't arrange to see them on a Tuesday morning.

Tagged: David Pannick QC, depression, LawCare, lawyers, LSB, stress at work