A crooked lawyer exposed by the Daily Mail has abandoned his appeal against being struck off the roll by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
Shahrokh Mireskandari, 53, was exposed by the Daily Mail in a series of articles in 2008 which saw Richard Pendlebury and Stephen Wright win the Cudlipp prize at the 2009 British Journalism Awards.
Mireskandari has already been ordered to pay £1.4m in legal costs after being struck off by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
Now he has been ordered to pay an additional £230,000 in costs after being condemned by a judge for “wholly abusive, unreasonable and manipulative conduct”, Press Association reports.
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A solicitors' disciplinary tribunal found him guilty in June 2012 of 104 breaches of the rules governing solicitors' conduct after a six-week hearing.
The Daily Mail revealed that he had faked his legal qualifications and hid criminal convictions while representing celebrity clients.
At the time he was representing ex-Met assistant commissioner Tarique Ghaffur in his race claim against the Met Police and former commissioner, Sir Ian Blair.
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Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee, publicly described him as a "very, very dear friend" and also as the "best lawyer in Britain".
In the aftermath of the Mail investigation, Mireskandari faced disciplinary action, his firm was closed down, his freidn the former Met police commander Ali Dizaei was suspended and Ghaffur had to drop his £1million-plus race claim.
Mireskandari claimed he was the victim of a racially motivated vendetta by the SRA and the Mail. But the tribunal dismissed this.
The SRA tribunal ruled that "without a shadow of a doubt" he acted dishonestly when he hid his criminal convictions for 15 counts of telemarketing fraud in America from the Law Society and the SRA when he returned to the UK.
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