Moneybags Mansfield tells ex-colleague: Sell property to pay me back
HE’S TROUSERED huge sums during his career as the self-styled champion of the underdog. But flamboyant barrister Michael Mansfield QC is not, it seems, someone who’ll write-off a debt.
For I can disclose that ‘Moneybags’ Mansfield, 79, is on the tail of fellow lawyer Maureen Ngozi obiezekpazu. In tandem with another eminent barrister, Patrick roche, Mansfield has just filed documents in London’s High Court seeking to force her to sell property so she can repay them a debt of some years standing.
It’s a sorry state of affairs, given that obi-ezekpazu and Mansfield were once colleagues at tooks Chambers, which boasted of its ‘proud record defending the rights of the underprivileged and the oppressed’.
‘the claim does relate to that time,’ a legal source tells me.
tooks dissolved itself in 2013 following cuts to Legal Aid on which it depended for 90 per cent of its income. thereafter, Mansfied and obi-ezekpazu went their separate ways. obi-ezekpazu now heads her own chambers, Family Matters, the website of which declares that its mission is ‘to empower and inspire clients to change their own lives’.
the thrice-married Mansfield is now the head of Nexus Chambers, which assures prospective clients: ‘We will fight for you.’
Mansfield’s crusading zeal tends to reward him handsomely. His prize paydays have included £740,000 for his role in the Bloody sunday inquiry and hundreds of thousands more for his work representing Mohamed Al-Fayed at the inquest into the death of the Princess of Wales.
obi-ezekpazu pulls in rather less. Her earnings temporarily came to a standstill in 2018 when she received a three-month suspension after the Legal ombudsman censured her for failing to reimburse a client.
the ombudsman found that she had behaved in a way ‘likely to diminish the trust and confidence which the public places in her or in the profession’, as well as failing ‘to take reasonable steps to manage her practice competently and in such a way as to achieve compliance with her legal and regulatory obligations’ and failing to give ‘all reasonable assistance requested of her’.
obi-ezekpazu did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Mansfield. But it appears that she’s one underdog he’s prepared to sink his teeth into.