A 41-year-old solicitor with mental health problems has been ordered to pay costs of nearly £60,000 ($78,000) after taking his wealthy Dubai-based parents to court to demand their continued financial support.
In a case described as unprecedented by a British High Court judge, the solicitor – a first-class history scholar with a masters degree in taxation – unsuccessfully claimed that his parents nurtured his dependency on them for 20 years but were now seeking for the state to pick up the tab.
The man has not worked since 2011 and has been living in his parents’ central London flat. The parents – described as “very wealthy” by the solicitor’s lawyers – had paid the bills but have since cut their level of support.
“The relationship between the applicant and his parents, in particular, it would appear, his father, has deteriorated and the financial support they are prepared to offer has significantly reduced,” said the judge in a High Court ruling published on Wednesday. None of those involved has been named by the court.
Lawyers for the solicitor said that he was a “vulnerable adult” and the judge had powers to order the parents to provide his upkeep. Papers filed by his lawyers claimed that as the parents were “starving him into submission”, he was a danger to himself and was wholly unlikely to get a job in line with his “high intellect” and academic achievements.
His barrister claimed that he would face the prospect of “penury and degradation but also squalor and abuse” if his parents cut off funds.
But the judge ruled against him and said that most lawyers would express “robust disbelief” that the case had even been brought before him. James Munby, the judge, said an adult should not be able to take his parents to court to get money from them.
Mr Munby did not outline the extent of the man’s illness. But he described the solicitor as an “unusually difficult, demanding” and dogged client for his lawyer to deal with.
The judge said the solicitor had to pay his parents’ costs of nearly £60,000 even though the man “to all intents and purposes has no resources at all”.
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