Skorupski's LawThe page the University of St Andrews' lawyers tried to take down
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Mark Sischy
RIPdied 24.1.2010
Mr Mark Sischy was a Chairman at the Edinburgh Employment Tribunals until he was removed from his post sometime in 2005. Before being a Chairman of the Employment Tribunals he had been a Sheriff in Glasgow. He had to be removed from that position also. 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 judgement 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 judgements 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 judgement finally appeared in January 2005 it was 78 pages long, Nevertheless, virtually all of the oral evidence of the witnesses I had called had simply disappeared from the record. Why? Mr Sischy was relieved of his duties (twice) because of alcohol problems. There is very good reason to doubt that he wrote the judgement 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 judgement 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 judgement 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 judgement 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 buried again! Regrettably this was not my only negative experience of the Scottish justice system... |
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"Pathologies" and destruction of evidence The two versions of the Corner/Esler report The vice chancellor's behaviour
***** The latest outrage in British Universities!! |
Why did
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In early 2003, however, Ms Fox also represented herself to another academic as a solicitor with Thompsons.
That academic was myself. A senior partner in Thompsons, David Stevenson, similarly represented her to me as a solicitor. On 10 September 2009 I wrote to The Law Society of Scotland in support of Dr Liu regarding the misrepresentation of Ms Fox by herself and others. The LSS therefore had plenty of time to notify the SLCC that Dr Liu's complaint was not an isolated one before the SLCC issued its Opinion to Dr Liu on 16 November. The LSS chose not to do so. It chose instead to turn a blind eye to Ms Fox's fraudulent behaviour—and to the equally fraudulent protection of her by Thompsons.
The story gets more interesting ...
Why did
The Scottish Employment Tribunals and the Employment Appeal Tribunal
cause large amounts of evidence to disappear?
Ms Fox's connection with me concerned a case I was bringing against the University of St Andrews in the Employment Tribunals for which I was seeking support from my union, the Association of University Teachers (AUT). Ms Fox wrote a report on the case for the AUT and directed them not to support it. Though the report was riddled with the most basic inaccuracies, the AUT—who also represented Ms Fox to me as a solicitor—conveniently decided to accept Ms Fox's recommendation anyway. It was much cheaper than pursuing the case...
Thanks to the extraordinarily incompetent and dishonest behaviour of Ms Fox, Thompsons and the AUT I had little option but to represent myself. Extraordinarily—and totally in contravention of normal procedure—the case required a number of sessions over a year and it took several months more to produce a judgment. When the verdict finally appeared, the Chairman of the tribunal—Mr Mark Sischy—had "disappeared" all but one line of the evidence of my witnesses. In fact there is very good reason to believe that the judgment was not written by Mr Sischy at all but by a "ghost writer" who had not been present at the tribunal hearings. Why? Because there is almost no reference to the evidence that was given orally.
Unsurprisingly, in view of the fraudulent nature of the judgment, I lost the case and, as a result, lost my career and a great deal else—very significant amounts of money, my home, and the life I had been expecting to lead.
There is more on the sordid relation between Thompsons and the AUT here
Mr Ian Truscott QC was the barrister retained by Shepherd & Wedderburn, the solicitors who 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.
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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 produced orally by witnesses was well and truly hidden from public scrutiny. Perhaps Mr Truscott's most breathtaking legerdemain was a request to the judge who presided over the employment appeal tribunal—the "Honourable" Lady Anne Smith—to prevent evidence that she had herself ordered to be produced from being heard. This evidence was the most significant part of the oral testimony which the author of the original tribunal judgment had "disappeared".
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In what could be interpreted as contempt of her own court (i.e. contempt for the order she had herself made at a preliminary hearing), Lady Smith obligingly agreed to bury the very evidence she had ordered to be produced. It was thus "legally" conjured away a second time. Lady Smith was able to get away with this by bullying into silence the timid and badly prepared barrister who represented me at the Employment Appeal Tribunal—Ms Catherine Callaghan of Blackstone Chambers, London. The "Honourable" Lady then refused leave to appeal to the Court of Session, thus making sure that the evidence that had been "disappeared" by the original tribunal remained out of sight.
Lady Smith's husband is David Smith, a former Chairman of Shepherd & Wedderburn, the solicitors who 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?
And more interesting still ...
* What 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?
* And, 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?
It's a nice little story, a story of the sordid underpinnings of universities in our times...
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...