The Man With A Plan

Everybody's favourite Property Litigator - Ian 'Daffyd' Austin - has been receiving warm messages of adulation in the press again. This week, the Manchester Evening News reported administrators BDO as stating that all the former FS and Equity Partners from Halliwells LLP will be interviewed in the New Year (we think possibly designed to co-incide with when the tax man seeks to collect his share). We are quite sure that both the former Fixed-Share and Equity members will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Austin and support him all the way.

The University of Salford - in a rare spectacle of actually complying with a Freedom of Information Request, even if it took them almost three months - have supplied expenses data about moneys paid to Halliwells LLP during the previous two financial years.

This comes to a total of circa. £20,000, with £17,000 of that being spent in the most recent financial year.

We anticipate that the majority of that £17,000 might have been spent upon pursuing the author(s) of the Rat Catchers of the Sewers blog.

Reading the Pre-Action correspondence sent to Dr Gary Duke (the presumed author), Ian Austin's initials are contained within the reference at the top of the page. This, naturally, raises several questions, such as:

1) How did Halliwells - and presumably Austin - come to be appointed to handle this case? Austin is said to be a specialist in Property Law (ironic!) and not defamation law. Surely there were more experienced candidates for the work?

2) Since during the previous financial year, University Council members were not legally permitted to receive any financial remuneration from the University - including for the procurement of services - who approved this expenditure?

3) Did Austin benefit from this expenditure? If so, there is a prima facie case for getting the pertinent Charity Regulators involved to assess the legality of this decision.

Of similar interest is the connection of the man who requested this information - Al Goodwin - to Halliwells LLP. Al Goodwin is a Senior Associate at Burges Salmon, a Bristol based firm of solicitors (and a very good one at that).

So what interest could they possibly have in this case? Well, reading a little further, it turns out that when Halliwells went belly up earlier this year, and a sizeable number of fresh Law graduates and recent recruits lost their Training Contracts/positions as a result, Burges Salmon took on a fair number of them to rescue them from destitution (quite generous!).

We anticipate that a fair number of 'state secrets' from Halliwells LLP might well have migrated with them. So do they know something we don't about Austin's relationship with Salford's procurement of legal services? Only time will tell.