England: Lawyer must pay £31,000 for dubbing colleagues ‘Jabba the Hutt’ and ‘Pol Pot’

Benedict Foster, a former senior solicitor in BNP Paribas’s London offices, was fined £15,000 by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and also told to pay an additional £16,000 in costs after he admitted to using “inappropriate” language in the workplace.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) heard that the lawyer used a number of “offensive” monikers to describe his colleagues, including “Mad Paul” and “the Twittering Fool”, while he was head of legal in the firm’s debt and equity capital markets division between December 2020 and September 2021. 

He denied, however, that the moniker “Mad Paul” was intended to undermine his co-worker. Instead, he said, the name was a reference to his colleague’s “slightly cavalier approach to timekeeping, attendance at the office and his interpersonal skill”.