Sir Gavin Lightman
QC and judge whose cases ranged from defending Private Eye to investigating Arthur Scargill
SIR GAVIN LIGHTMAN, who has died aged 80, was an extremely busy QC, and later a High Court judge in the Chancery Division; it was said that his judgments invariably reflected his sound sense of justice. In an extraordinarily varied legal career, he saved Private Eye from insolvency, caused Hugh Hefner to sack Victor Lownes from the Playboy clubs, defended Kevin and Ian Maxwell, and enabled Jonathan Cape to publish the Crossman diaries. He acted for the National Union of Miners, befriending Arthur Scargill, though he later exposed a number of serious irregularities during the miners’ strike in his celebrated Lightman Report (1990).
Gavin Anthony Lightman was born on December 20 1939. The Lightmans were immigrant Lithuanians, originally called Likhtmakher, who came over from Vilnius in the 1890s and settled in Leeds. Gavin was the son (and father) of a QC. His grandfather set up a furniture business in Leeds, while his father, Harold Lightman, left school at 14. A determined man, Harold was one of the first Jews to head a chambers, at Lincoln’s Inn, at 13 Old Square, also overcoming the disadvantage of not having gone to university.
From the age of two and a half, young Gavin attended boarding school, where life was not easy for him, owing to anti-semitic bullying. Later he was educated at Dulwich College and earned the only LLB first class honours awarded at UCL in 1961. He caused controversy as head of the debating society by inviting Sir Oswald Mosley to propose the motion: “This House would restrict Commonwealth immigration.” It was roundly defeated.
In 1963, after studying for an LLM at the University of Michigan as a Fulbright scholar (in 2009 he was elected the first patron of the British Fulbright Scholarship Association), Lightman was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn with its most senior scholarship.
Later, he was also called to the bars of Barbados, Bermuda, Singapore and Hong Kong. He soon developed one of the most wide-ranging practices at the Chancery Bar, on one day alone attending 14 court hearings and conferences.
Early in his career he represented the owners of two luxury flats bought by Zsa Zsa Gabor, and forced her to pay the £55,350 she owed. In 1969, when a Special Branch detective was accused of vanishing with his two children, he told the court: “The policeman had no more vanished than I had.” The detective had complied with the court order, but feared his children were in moral danger. In 1976 Lightman successfully opposed the attempt by the Attorney General to prevent Jonathan Cape publishing the late Richard Crossman’s diaries, Michael Foot (one of Crossman’s executors) opposing his own government.
Lightman took silk in 1980, proving himself a superb advocate, generous to his opponents while never losing the fearless quality that served his clients well.
In 1989 he saved Private Eye from insolvency when he persuaded the Court of Appeal to set aside the jury’s award of £600,000 damages to Sonia Sutcliffe, wife of the imprisoned Yorkshire Ripper, whom they had accused of profiting financially from her husband’s crimes.
When the first verdict came through, the Eye’s editor, Ian Hislop, had told reporters: “If that’s justice, I’m a banana.” The “Bananaballs” funding appeal was launched in the Eye and Lightman argued that “there is precious little scope in this country for investigative and critical journalism. There should be respect for the law, not fear. This kind of situation creates not fear, but despair.” The award was reduced to £60,000, the first time a jury award had ever been overturned on appeal.
Lightman became closely involved with the efforts of the National Union of Mineworkers to place assets beyond reach of sequestrators during the famous miners’ strike of 1984 to 1985. Initially Arthur Scargill became something of a friend. But then Lightman delivered his 253-page report, following a three-month investigation. At first Scargill claimed that he had been vindicated, but in July 1990 the Daily Mirror wrote: “The more the layers of the Lightman report are peeled away, the greater is the stench.”
His conclusion was that through Scargill, the NUM had sought not just political but also financial help from Russia and Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, and that “as a matter of law, there have been a number of misapplications of funds and breaches of duty”, including the operation of two separate sets of accounts, one official and the other unofficial, the latter having no supervision or control.
He considered it a matter of concern that, particularly in the case of Scargill, “he did not recognise the impropriety of what seemed to me to have been so obviously wrong.”
In 1986, as chairman of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association disciplinary tribunal, he gave Alex “Hurricane” Higgins a lengthy ban from snooker tournaments and stripped him of 25 ranking points for headbutting a tournament director.
He was instrumental in securing the site of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on the South Bank in London for the director, Sam Wanamaker, and advised Hugh Hefner to sack Victor Lownes as head of UK Playboy clubs in 1981 on account of irregularities identified by the Gaming Board for Great Britain.
He represented Kevin and Ian Maxwell in their claim that they had a privilege against self-incrimination. In 1992 he gave his opinion that if payments to the Conservative Party by Asil Nadir were not to be disclosed, then the act was illegal – “an intention from the very beginning to commit a legal offence”.
While a judge in the Chancery Division, appointed in 1994, he secured the Lord Chancellor’s permission not to sit on
Shabbat or Jewish holidays – Lord Mackay was sympathetic, since for religious reasons he himself never did any work on a Sunday. Lightman was also appointed as a judge of the Administrative Court and assigned as a judge of the Competition Court.
He gave a number of important judgments in the fields of insolvency, pensions law, land law, court procedure, mediation, trusts, intellectual property, administrative law and arbitration.
When in 2001 he was appointed to hear the long-running case of Thyssen v Thyssen in the Supreme Court of Bermuda, with costs exceeding £60 million, in which Baron Heini Thyssen accused his son of defaulting on payments from the family trust, estimated to be worth £1.7 billion, he earned the reputation of being a “nononsense judge who can seize this case by the scruff of the neck, shake it around and get it sorted out”.
The case was soon settled. He had to be granted additional security when in 2005 he determined in a civil action that on the balance of probabilities, the slum landlord Nicholas van Hoogstraten had recruited two thugs in 1999 to murder Mohammed Sabir Raja, with whom he had been in a business relationship. The Raja family was awarded £6 million, though van Hoogstraten did not have the money to pay.
As a judge, Lightman adhered to the view that mediation and settlement were better courses than litigation: “In litigation there is only one winner – and that is generally the lawyer.”
He also maintained that “the aim of the judge is by judicial intervention to promote justice by saving time and costs and concentrating on essential issues without any sacrifice of the principles of judicial impartiality.”
With Gabriel Moss QC, Lightman co-authored the leading textbook on receivership law. He taught Law at Sheffield University and at Merton College, Oxford, and was elected a fellow of UCL.
On his retirement in 2008 he practised as an arbitrator and mediator, as a consultant to two law firms, and as chairman of the Investment Committee of a leading litigation funder. He lectured extensively in the UK and in Singapore, China, India, New Zealand and the Caribbean, in particular in the fields of mediation, insolvency, and court procedure.
He was Treasurer of Lincoln’s Inn for the year 2008-09 and from 2009 to 2012 was President of GEMME (the European Association of Judges for Mediation).
In 1965 he married Naomi Claff, a lecturer in English Literature, who survives him with their son and two daughters.
Sir Gavin Lightman, born December 20 1939, died March 2 2020