R v Raymondip Bedi

Senior Costs Judge Rowley:

1. This is an appeal by Sonn MacMillan Walker solicitors against the decision of the determining officer to calculate the on the basis of a guilty plea rather than a trial fee under the Criminal Legal Aid (Remuneration) Regulations 2013, as amended.

2. The solicitors were instructed on behalf of Raymondip Bedi , who pleaded guilty to his part in a conspiracy to defraud investors in respect of crypto currency. The extent of the fraud overall was approximately £1.5 million.

3. The solicitors submitted a basis of plea on behalf of Bedi, which particularly argued that he was not the architect of the conspiracy and that the sums involved in respect of the investors who were defrauded by him were almost exactly half of the approximately £1.5 million obtained overall.

4. The defendant submitted a revised basis of plea following production of further evidence from the prosecution. Whilst he maintained his position regarding one of the co-defendants, Mr Mavanga, being the architect of the scheme, the defendant revised the sum for which he was liable to £1.198 million.

5. A Newton hearing was listed for 27 June 2025, at which both the defendant and Mr Mavanga appeared. There was no basis of plea in respect of Mr Mavanga and the hearing, so far as he was concerned, was simply a sentencing hearing. The determining officer considered the court logs and a partial transcript of the hearing on 27 June 2025 and a further transcript of the handing down of the sentences, which occurred a week later.

6. Based upon those documents, the determining officer considered that both defendants had in fact been involved in a sentencing hearing, and as such calculated the fee payable to the solicitors in this appeal by reference to a guilty plea. The appeal against that decision is based upon the proposition that the hearing listed for a Newton hearing in June 2025 did indeed involve factual disputes and that as such, in accordance with the 2013 Regulations, the fee should be calculated as a trial fee.

7. The appellant solicitors were represented by Colin Wells of counsel at the hearing of this appeal. Counsel’s skeleton argument records that the difference between a trial fee and a guilty plea fee is considerable (£106,000 versus £30,000 in round terms). It is not surprising therefore, that appeals such as this are relatively common.

8. The term, a “Newton Hearing” comes from the 1982 case of R v Robert John Newton which has been summarised in numerous cases thereafter. A Newton Hearing takes place where, in order for the judge to pass sentence appropriately, a factual dispute or disputes needs to be resolved. There are three procedural possibilities for this to occur: i) the disputed facts could be put before the jury for their decision ii) The judge could hear evidence and then come to a conclusion; or iii) the judge could hear no live evidence, but instead listen to submissions from counsel and then come to a conclusion

9. The first possibility requires a trial to have taken place. The second requires (usually) the defendant and, potentially, witnesses for the Crown to give evidence before the judge decides upon the disputed facts as part of passing sentence. It is presumably relatively easy for these possibilities to be evidenced to the satisfaction of the determining officer and I am unaware of any appeals, at least recently, where either the first or second possibility has taken place.

10. Instead, the battleground seems always to be whether the submissions of the Crown and defence counsel, along with the views of the judge are sufficient to establish that materially relevant facts were in dispute and then ruled upon by the judge. Given the difference in the fee applicable to a trial fee, as opposed to a guilty plea fee, there is a need, in my view, to demonstrate that something of substance has been in dispute. This has sometimes been described as being a relatively high bar for the appellant litigator or advocate to surmount.

11. In this case, the trial judge, HHJ Griffith, both during submissions by counsel and in his sentencing remarks, refers to submissions made by the parties regarding other cases and the sentences that were passed in those cases. The judge plainly considered that to be no longer the appropriate approach and the reference to the Sentencing Guidelines was now the important reference point. I mention this simply because many appeals concerning hearings said to be Newton Hearings rather than simply a sentencing hearing revolve around where to place a defendant within those Sentencing Guidelines. Decisions of costs judges have been consistent in concluding that such arguments do not provide the materiality required to justify the description of a Newton Hearing having taken place.

12. One of the submissions raised by Mr Hone, the defendant’s counsel at the hearing, as described briefly above, related to who was the “architect” of the scheme. The additional transcript, in respect of the 27 June 2025 hearing, contains Mr Hones’ spirited attempts to persuade the judge that the defendant was acting underneath Mr Mavanga. The judge plainly was not with Mr Hone in this respect during the submissions and saw little difference between the two defendants, other than that they carried out different roles which played to their respective strengths. That viewpoint ran through into the sentencing remarks where the judge recorded “leading roles for both of you.” In any event, it seems to me that this argument is just the sort of submission made in respect of placing the defendant’s culpability at the appropriate point on the scales in the Sentencing Guidelines. That view is strengthened by the fact that discussions regarding whether a Newton hearing was required at all, had ended prior to the “nuances” of the defendant’s position on seniority being raised.

13. The main point submitted by Mr Wells concerned the valuation of the fraud. Mr Wells pointed to the fact that, in the sentencing remarks, the lower value of the fraud perpetrated by Mr Bedi resulted in his starting point for sentencing being six months, less than Mr Mavanga who was liable for the full fraud. That is undoubtedly correct, but I do not see that it assists the solicitors in their argument that a Newton hearing had taken place.

14. R v Newton also confirmed that if there was doubt between the arguments put forward between the Crown and the defence, then the defence’s position was the one to be adopted for the purposes of sentencing. As the judge under appeal in Newton put it: “Where I find there is substantial conflict between the two versions, then it is incumbent upon me, as one would expect in this country, to take the more lenient view, to accept the accused’s version so far as possible and to pass sentence accordingly.”

15. Whilst the Court of Appeal decided that the judge had not followed this approach, they described this passage as being a “perfectly proper exposition of the law…”

16. It regularly appears to be the case that the defendant will raise some matter in the basis of plea on which the prosecution can provide little or no evidence in response. The prosecution’s sentencing note, often effectively puts the defendant to proof albeit that no evidence then actually seems to be called.

17. In this case, during submissions, the judge said the following: “Right, I have listened to the prosecution, and I quite agree with many of the things that they say. It seems to me that whether your client starts with £1,100,000 and whatever or £1,400,000 or £1,500,000, when you look at all the things that there are in or around the sentencing exercise, I do not think it is worth delaying matters any further in order for there to be a Newton hearing about that sort of thing. There are countless different little things that differentiate between the two of them, or do not, and so I think I have just got to make the best of it without wasting time by going through that figure for the purpose of sentencing.”

18. Shortly afterwards, the judge said, even more succinctly: “I am just saying that I do not think there should be a Newton hearing in deciding the difference between £1.1 million and £1.5 million.”

19. In the transcript, Mr Hone then “moves on” rather than pressing for a Newton hearing to be officially recorded.

20. For the purposes of the 2013 Regulations, there is sometimes a gap between the trial judge’s view of what has occurred (e.g. whether a trial has started) and costs judges’ decisions on cases regarding litigators’ and advocates’ fees. As such, a decision on material facts following submissions by the advocates, but without any evidence being called, may not appear to be a Newton hearing to the judge. Nevertheless, it is a fairly clear indication that the judge did not consider the matters he was being asked to contemplate were ones which affected the sentence that he would be required to pass.

21. Nor do I think that the fact that evidence was produced by the parties in compliance with directions given by the judge on a previous occasion is of help to the solicitors in this case. I do not see any indication that the judge felt the need to put off the sentencing hearing itself until a later date in order to consider the evidence that had been provided. It merely succeeded in causing Mr Bedi to revise his view of his basis of plea and therefore narrow the dispute. If the gap had remained at approximately £750,000 then it might have been that evidence would be given and the judge be required to make a finding material to his sentencing. As it was, however, he clearly did not consider the difference between the two figures to be sufficient to make a difference which justified holding a Newton hearing.

22. The final argument put forward by the solicitors in this case is a novel one as far as I am concerned. It relates to the amount of credit available to the defendant for an early guilty plea. Neither Mr Bedi nor Mr Mavanga pleaded guilty at the magistrates’ court. Mr Hone submitted, in relation to the case of Mr Bedi that, on the first appearance, there was very little time for his solicitor to advise him on 71 pages of prosecution documents and he was not advised about credit for guilty pleas. Similarly, he was not given the usual warning by the court about what would happen if he did not plead guilty straightaway, and on that basis, Mr Hone contended for the full 33% discount for the guilty plea at the first opportunity at the Crown Court.

23. Mr Hone was then about to move on to his next point when HHJ Griffith said: “Well, let us deal with that one: I think that in the circumstances, it would be fairer to say that both of them get 33%…”

24. Mr Wells’ argument on the appeal was that the discount allowed by the judge was 33% rather than 25% and that had made a material difference to the sentence and as such had brought this hearing within the description of a Newton hearing.

25. The judge’s decision came as a result of the advocates providing the timeline for the defendants in terms of guilty pleas and the judge made a ruling in little more than a sentence. In his sentencing remarks, the judge commented that with an offence of the size of the one in this case it was unreasonable to expect a defendant to indicate a guilty plea before some consideration, at least, of the evidence had been undertaken and advice given on that evidence.

26. It seems to me that this is a good example of mitigation which does not begin to cover the sort of ground contemplated by R v Newton and which would justify the considerably enhanced fees which equate to preparation of a trial. Ms Weisman, who appeared for the Lord Chancellor on this appeal, drew a distinction between this procedural issue and facts which might be disputed arising from the events which caused the defendant to be prosecuted in the first place. I think there is considerable force in this distinction but, in relation this case, there was no dispute about the facts in any event. Neither defendant had pleaded guilty on the first occasion. The submissions to the judge were based on those agreed facts and sought the court’s discretion. That is many miles away from a dispute of fact which has to be decided in order for the judge to be able to pass an appropriate sentence.

27. For the reasons given, therefore, this appeal fails.