Once upon a time, Phil Shiner was the superstar Left-wing lawyer feted by civil rights groups Liberty and Justice. After all, he was the man daring to accuse members of the British armed forces of the murder and physical abuse of hundreds of Iraqi civilians during the Second Gulf War. Both Liberty and Justice named him as their lawyer of the year in 2004.
But now, in the space of just a few short years, 67-year-old Shiner has been declared bankrupt and disbarred from the legal profession. The accusations against British troops were false, and Shiner illegally pocketed millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money pursuing them.
He has now pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud relating to applications made in 2007 for public funding for legal action against the Ministry of Defence. When he is sentenced in December, he faces up to 10 years in prison. Suffice to say, few will shed a tear for a man who is seen by many as the embodiment of the arrogant, corrupt, grasping lawyer.
Brought up in Coventry, where he attended a Catholic comprehensive school, Shiner studied law at Birmingham University before graduating in 1978. He set up his Birmingham law firm Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) in 1999 and was once a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, professor of law at Middlesex University, the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Kent University and a former vice-president of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers.
The controversy over the war in Iraq, which began in 2003, offered Shiner and his company the opportunity to cash in on claims being made by Iraqi civilians that they and their families were victims of abuse, and in some cases murder, by British troops.
Shiner’s reputation as a human rights lawyer peaked during his pursuit of justice on behalf of the family of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi hotel receptionist, who died after being beaten by British troops in Basra in 2003. The report of the official inquiry into Mousa’s death, published in 2011, found that British soldiers inflicted “violent and cowardly” assaults on Iraqi civilians but refuted allegations that there had been a policy of systematic abuse of detainees.
Yet Shiner consistently argued that Mousa’s killing was symptomatic of a wider problem and often claimed that the British Army wasn’t an organisation with one “bad apple” in a barrel but a barrel full of bad apples. At that stage, he represented more than 150 Iraqis in other claims and called for a single inquiry into the UK’s detention policy in Iraq.
Foremost among those claims were allegations about the 2004 “Battle of Danny Boy” near Basra, in which members of the Mahdi army, an Iraqi militia, ambushed a British patrol. Shiner claimed that Iraqi civilians had been captured, tortured and executed by British troops in the aftermath of the battle.
Among them was an allegation by Khuder Al-Sweady that his nephew, Hamid Al-Sweady, 19, was unlawfully killed while in the custody of British troops at Camp Abu Naji. Such an implausible and complex conspiracy would have required the active participation of several hundred soldiers from the lowest ranks to the unit’s commanding officer. Yet this central flaw in Shiner’s claim seemed to have been lost in the seemingly endless swirl of allegations emanating from his law firm.
In 2007, Shiner made an application to the Legal Services Commission in which he sought up to £200,000 of legal aid funding for his firm to represent clients including Khuder Al-Sweady, in an application for judicial review. But, crucially, in making his application, Shiner failed to disclose that an agent acting on his behalf and with his knowledge had been cold-calling and making unsolicited approaches to potential clients in Iraq. He also failed to disclose that he was paying referral fees.
The same year, Shiner was named solicitor of the year at the “excellence awards” run by the Law Society, the industry’s professional body. As ceremony host Jeremy Vine asserted, he had firmly established himself as one of the most famous lawyers in the country.
The National Crime Agency (NCA), which later investigated and brought fraud charges against Shiner, said the practices he had employed were not permitted as part of gaining a legal aid contract. The “Danny Boy” claims resulted in the judge-led Al Sweady inquiry, which lasted five years, from 2009 onwards, and cost the British taxpayer around £25m. According to the NCA, Shiner received about £3m as part of the contract to represent alleged victims.
British lawyers for the Iraqis conceded a year into the hearings that there was “insufficient evidence” to establish that Iraqis were unlawfully killed in the British camp. However, they did not withdraw the allegations of ill-treatment of Iraqis. Lawyers for the MoD described the allegations as “the product of lies,” and evidence that was deliberately fabricated. Those making them were guilty of a criminal conspiracy, the MoD said.
In 2010, the then Labour Government established the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) after 146 Iraqi men, many of whom were represented by Shiner, said they had been brutally assaulted by British troops at three interrogation sites near Basra which had been operated by the Joint Interrogation Centre between March 2003 and 2008.
The evidence of abuse was at best thin: in one case, one Iraqi who claimed he was a victim of torture, had actually been tapped on the head with a rolled up piece of A4 paper. Wrapping up its work in 2014, the Al-Sweady Inquiry rejected allegations that British soldiers murdered insurgents and mutilated their bodies during the Battle of Danny Boy.
In the wake of the inquiry’s conclusion, Shiner’s admission to paying an Iraqi middleman led to him being charged by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. But he did not attend its two-day hearing, held in 2016, claiming in writing that “he was unwell and could not afford to pay for a defence lawyer.” The tribunal marked the beginning of a vertiginous fall for Shiner, the one-time doyen of those members of the Left who appeared to revel in trashing the reputation of the Armed Forces and those who served within it.
The tribunal found him “guilty of multiple professional misconduct charges, including dishonesty and lack of integrity” and 22 misconduct charges were proved to the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt. By February 2017, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal struck him off the Roll of Solicitors and also ordered him to pay for the full costs of the prosecution, starting with a down payment of £250,000.
In the same year the then Tory Defence Secretary Michael Fallon announced that the IHAT investigations would be shut down within months. MPs had called it an “unmitigated failure” after it failed to bring a single prosecution despite costing almost £5 million. A subsequent House of Commons Defence Committee report found failings in the conduct of investigations and concluded that those serving personnel and veterans being investigated had suffered unacceptable stress, had their lives put on hold and careers damaged.
Five years later, in June 2022, Shiner was charged with three counts of fraud relating to allegations of cold calling and using agents in Iraq. At that point, he entered a not guilty plea. Shiner was alleged to have failed to disclose to the Legal Aid Agency that he had engaged in cold-calling to solicit cases and had paid referral fees to agents in Iraq. It was also alleged that he committed fraud by false representation by providing an “untrue and misleading” response to a question from the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Despite claiming he was innocent, Shiner changed his plea on September 30 this year to guilty.
Shiner’s damage arguably extended beyond slander and fraud, however. Many senior officers believe that his approach helped in the recruitment of young Iraqis into the various Shia militias that launched attacks against British troops, leaving hundreds dead and wounded.
I also witnessed first hand how his lies were propagated. At the time I was The Sunday Telegraph’s defence correspondent, and I once attended a press conference where Shiner described how on one day in Basra a British soldier on patrol dropped into a kneeling position, pulled his SA80 assault rifle into his shoulder and inexplicably shot dead an eight-year-old Iraqi girl wearing a yellow dress as she played with friends in the litter-strewn streets of her neighbourhood.
At the end of the press conference, I found Shiner chatting to a group of journalists about the atrocities he claimed were being committed daily by British soldiers in Iraq. I asked him whether he had any more details about the girl who had allegedly been murdered. I asked Shiner if he knew the date of the shooting. “No,” he responded curtly. “How about the name of the regiment involved?” Shiner refused to answer and instead asked for my name. When I answered he said: “So, you’re Sean Rayment. I ought to punch you in the face. My family has received death threats because of your articles.” “But what about the murder allegations?” I responded. Shiner remained silent and eventually left. I had written a series of articles questioning Shiner’s claims – particularly his allegations at the Battle of Danny Boy. The Basra incident was, of course, all fabricated.
Even today the mere mention of Shiner’s name has the capacity to invoke a bilious response from members of the veterans community who served in the Iraq War. “Shiner has destroyed the lives of so many good people, heroes of this country who have put their lives on the line,” says Colonel Philip Ingram, a former Army Intelligence Officer, who served in Iraq during the time that Shiner claimed British soldiers murdered and abused civilians. “This disgusting individual thought of a way of ripping the taxpayer off for personal gain, giving false hope to people who have lost people in conflict, made the world less safe for our service personnel and destroyed lives. He is the epitome of all things evil – the law doesn’t allow what I think should happen to him so I hope he rots in prison for the rest of his life. I would be insulting rats if I called him an evil rat – he is worse.”
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