Skorupski's Law

At the University of St Andrews

Occulto verum
est carus
[To conceal the truth is expensive...]

They never lie to journalists

They never perjure themselves in the Employment Tribunals

They spent £204,192.36
to defend the reputation of an academic department


They destroyed all the evidence of a University Executive report
describing an academic department as "pathological"


They do not permit supervisors to rewrite your PhD thesis
for you to make sure you pass

The University of St Andrews just can't stop lying!

In an article in the Times Higher Education the University of St Andrews
has claimed that it spent £204,192.36 on legal fees on one case in the Employment Tribunals
and Employment Appeal Tribunal to protect the academic reputation of one of its departments.

In fact it was the University Executive that rubbished the department in question
(in a document known as the Corner-Esler Report) referring to its behaviours as a series of "pathologies"
and forcing the department chair to resign her position. This rubbishing was continued by
the Principal of the University in his evidence to the Employment Tribunals, when he compared the department
in question to the [alleged] "dishonesty, lying and cheating" of an infamous African tribe called the Ik
[thus exposing Lang, himself a former anthropologist, to ridicule since "refuting this view of the Ik... is an
essay topic for first-year social anthropology students at St Andrews" - see Wikipedia].

The real scandal in this story is not, however, the amount of public money spent to squash one lecturer
or that an academic department in one of the UK's " top" universities was utterly disfunctional.
It is the fact that a large amount of public money was used to pay an unscrupulous barrister
to commit perjury on behalf of the University.
The University now continues its never-ending deceptions by lying to the journalist
who wrote the Times Higher Education story.

When the Corner-Esler Report was produced I challenged the Principal of the University of St Andrews
in regard to its findings. I was told, after considerable delay, that the University had destroyed the evidence
on which the report was based — even though they knew there was a strong possibility of legal proceedings.
The Secretary to the University subsequently confirmed to the Employment Tribunal that he had destroyed evidence.
In an extraordinary meeting, the Principal forbade me to speak of any matter connected to the Corner-Esler Report any further.
Because of this and other unacceptable behaviour by the University Executive I went to the Employment Tribunals.
A University in which a lecturer cannot speak about a report condemning his department is a travesty.

The University did not “publicly establish the facts”, as they claim in the Times Higher Education article.
They did the exact opposite, using their barrister to produce a web of deceit.
Their claim that I went to the Employment Tribunals because of the behaviour of my departmental colleagues is false.
Pathological though this was — awarding of fake PhDs and the like — my contract was not with them.
I went to the Employment Tribunals because of the behaviour of the University Executive, which was
making a mockery of the idea of a University and was clearly in breach of contract.

If, as the University claims in the Times Higher Education article, “the institution is vindicated”
by the result of the employment tribunal and subsequent appeal, it is because
the tribunals buried large amounts of evidence to protect the “royal” university
and to protect an alcoholic tribunal Chairman who has since drunk himself to death (see below).
The problem is that one lie needs another one to cover it up and then another to cover that, and so on.
And that is where very expensive  lawyers come in.

Why did...
the lawyers of the University of St Andrews,
paid £204,192.36 by the University to win an Employment Tribunal,
attempt to take down this website?

Ian Truscott QC was retained by Shepherd & Wedderburn solicitors and paid tens of thousands of pounds by the University of St Andrews. He submitted a tissue of misrepresentations to the Scottish Employment Tribunals to protect the University.

Why do...
the Employment Tribunals refuse to say if one of its full-time Chairmen
presided over any tribunals during a two-year period?
Is it connected to a fraudulent judgment,
delivered by an alcoholic Chairman and covered up by a Supreme Court judge?

Mark Sischy, former Chairman of the Scottish Employment Tribunals, perverted the course of justice. He signed a judgment containing a tissue of misrepresentations and buried large amounts of evidence to protect the University of St Andrews.

Why did...
this Supreme Court judge cover up for an alcoholic
Employment Tribunal Chairman ?

Lady Anne Smith, Scottish Supreme Court judge, ensured that evidence buried by the Scottish Employment Tribunals to protect the University of St Andrews remained covered up and that a judgment containing a tissue of misrepresentations went unchallenged.

Is it really possible...
to get a PhD from the "royal" university
even though you can't write a coherent paragraph? Go here.

Roy Dilley, Dean of Arts at the University of St Andrews, refused to give evidence to an Employment Tribunal.

Have you ever wondered...
what philosophers, anthropologists and other academics get up to
when they're not talking about logic, the state of humanity and suchlike? Go here.

Peter Clark, Proctor and Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of St Andrews, lied to an Employment Tribunal.

Have you ever wanted to be...
a Member of the Scottish Parliament while pretending to be a solicitor
and defrauding clients with your firm's blessing as the
Scottish Law Society turns a blind eye? No problem. Go here.

Carol Fox, now a solicitor in Fox Cross Solicitors, Edinburgh, is a former Labour Party candidate for the Scottish Parliament.

*****

The story continues below...

Mark Sischy
RIP

Full Sunday Express text here

Mr Mark Sischy, who died on 24 January 2010, was a Chairman at the Edinburgh Employment Tribunals until he was removed from his post in July 2006. In 1997 he was also removed from his previous position as a Sheriff in Glasgow. During 2003/4 he presided over an employment tribunal where I (Declan Quigley) brought a claim and produced evidence of all kinds of skullduggery at the University of St Andrews none of which has ever been denied by anyone.

Very unusually indeed, the Employment Tribunal met on 21 separate days, not including preliminary hearings, during 2003 and 2004, the final day being 18 May 2004. The judgment was finally signed by Mr Sischy on 18 January 2005 in spite of the fact that he had assured all parties that he would not take longer than three months, the prescribed maximum period for delivering Employment Tribunal judgments in England — though not in Scotland, where, it seems, you can take as long as you want, as we were to find out later in an astonishing hearing at the Employment Appeal Tribunal.

When the judgment finally appeared in January 2005 it was 78 pages long. It was littered with factual errors and untenable interpretations and was devoid of virtually all of the oral evidence of the witnesses; this evidence had simply disappeared from the record. Why was the judgment so fraudulent? Mr Sischy was relieved of his duties twice because of his problems with alcohol, problems which appear to have led to his death. There is very good reason to doubt that he wrote the judgment in relation to the case of Quigley vs the University of St Andrews. It is very doubtful if he was capable given that he had been on prolonged sick leave during the preceding months. Anyone familiar with the case could only conclude that it had been written by someone who had not attended the hearings and who had relied solely on the written documents available. Moreover the judgment was written in a style so sympathetic to the University that one could be forgiven for thinking that it was drafted by the University's lawyers.

There is no doubt that Mr Sischy cynically perverted the course of justice by concealing evidence that went to the heart of the case. Whether he did this directly by deliberately burying evidence and writing a dishonest judgment, or indirectly, by signing a judgment he had not himself written, has never been clarified and doubtless now never will be. There is another possibility. Mr Sischy had made so few notes that they were useless to a man with an alcohol problem or to a surrogate who had not attended the hearings and was trying to patch together a judgment without reference to the evidence given orally. During the course of the tribunal I asked Mr Sischy, who appeared to be writing very little down, what the record of the tribunal was. I remember his answer very clearly: "The record is what I choose it to be".

There is no doubt that Mr Sischy's condition was known to the judge who presided over the appeal hearing — "Lady" Anne Smith. How do we know this? Because Lady Smith herself referred to the impossibility of getting hold of Mr Sischy's notes given his condition. Lady Smith subsequently ordered the two parties to the dispute to come up with an agreed transcript of the evidence of one witness. When my barrister then tried to present this evidence she was prevented from doing so by Lady Smith, so that the evidence which Mr Sischy had buried was made to disappear again.

Lady Smith, who agreed to bury evidence she had herself ordered to be produced.

It is difficult to interpret this move as anything other than contempt by Lady Smith of her own court — i.e. contempt for the order she had herself made at a preliminary hearing.

Lady Smith's husband is David Smith, a former Chairman of Shepherd & Wedderburn, the firm of solicitors which represented the University of St Andrews. Lady Smith herself did training at Shepherd & Wedderburn. She was asked to recuse herself from the case because of the obvious conflict of interest but she refused.

Was this justice being done and being seen to be done?

Lady Smith was able to get away with this legal conjuring trick thanks to the unacceptable behaviour, in quite different ways, of the barristers on each side. On the one hand, the barrister who represented me at the Employment Appeal Tribunal — Ms Catherine Callaghan of Blackstone Chambers, London — allowed herself to be bullied into silence. Ms Callaghan failed both to present evidence that went to the heart of the case, and to ascertain how long was considered reasonable in Scotland to produce a judgment. Lady Smith refused to answer any questions, saying simply that she was not there to answer questions and that "English" rules did not apply in Scotland, implying that the Scottish Employment Tribunals can do what they like and take as long as they want. Apart from what Lady Smith said, her behaviour was quite disgracefully bad-mannered. Ms Callaghan has said she has never been treated so badly in a court. Nevertheless, she was paid substantial sums of money not to be intimidated in this way.

Mr Ian Truscott QC was the barrister retained by Shepherd & Wedderburn, the firm of solicitors which represented the University of St Andrews both at my original tribunal and at the appeal tribunal. Paid tens of thousands of pounds by the University of St Andrews, Mr Truscott is a master of his trade.

Ian Truscott QC, the barrister who represented the University of St Andrews. Paid very large sums of the University's money, he used every trick at his disposal first to delay proceedings and then to present a tissue of misrepresentations .

Conveniently for Mr Truscott, his legal wizardry was very substantially aided by the determination of both the Chairman of the Employment Tribunal and the judge presiding over the Appeal Tribunal to make sure that certain information was well and truly hidden from public scrutiny. Again and again he objected to questions being put to the university's witnesses and again and again the Chairman went along with this. Thus we never found out what the Principal of the University of St Andrews knew about evidence that had been destroyed. The Chairman shouted at me that I was not allowed to ask him that. When Professor Overing was asked by me why she had been removed from the position of Head of Department, the Chairman agreed with Mr Truscott that she didn't have to answer this because it would be "humiliating" for her.

Perhaps Mr Truscott's most breathtaking legerdemain was his request to Lady Smith that evidence that she herself had ordered to be produced should not be heard. When Lady Smith immediately agreed to this, any observer could have been forgiven for concluding that a strategy had been agreed between them before the appeal was heard.

Mr Truscott pulled another very clever trick on the opening day to ensure that the proceedings were delayed so that waiting journalists were discouraged from attending again. On this occasion, the Chairman — Mr Sischy — also gave every appearance of following a script of Mr Truscott's design. Mr Truscott convened a very peculiar in camera meeting at which only he, Mr Sischy and myself were permitted to attend. Even the two lay members of the tribunal were prohibited from attending this meeting.

Again and again I found myself laughing at the absurdity of courts where the judges refused to consider the evidence. It was like something out of a novel by Kafka. What is one supposed to do when it is the judges who are perverting the course of justice?

* What exactly were the Chairman of the Employment Tribunal (Mr Mark Sischy), the judge presiding over the Appeal Tribunal (Lady Anne Smith) and the barrister representing the University of St Andrews (Mr Ian Truscott) so keen to hide?
* Was it, by any chance, the "pathological" practices at the University of St Andrews that were exposed at the Employment Tribunals?
* Was this concealment by any chance connected to the fact that St Andrews was the "royal" university and that the claimant had been one of Prince William's lecturers?
* Perhaps most interesting of all, who kept silent when they should not have kept silent — and who covered up, and continues to cover up, for whom? In spite of repeated Freedom of Information requests, the President of the Scottish Employment Tribunals refuses to divulge how many tribunals Mr Sischy presided over in his last two years of service. Naturally, an alcoholic Chairman should not be presiding over cases. But then he shouldn't be issuing judgments either...

read on...

Skorupski's Law

Concerning the corruption of universities
and how 'they' get away with it with a little help from their friends in the legal establishment...