A city barrister who lives in a house worth £600K SACKED after dodging £19,000 worth of train fares
Peter Barnett, 45, banned from practising profession by Bar Standards Board after independent tribunal
A HIGH-flying City lawyer has been sacked from his profession after it was revealed he skipped thousands of pounds of train fares.
It emerged last year that Oxford graduate Peter Barnett, 45, had evaded up to almost £20,000 of fares over a period of several years.
Barnett – who lives in a house worth £600,000 in Thame, Oxfordshire – made hundreds of journeys without buying a ticket between April 2012 and November 2014.
Instead of buying the necessary season ticket for his 80-mile round trip - currently priced at £19.80 each way - the barrister simply touched out at London's Marylebone station using his Oyster card.
This meant he paid only the maximum TfL fare - currently £7.60.
But he was convicted of six counts of fraud by false representation last year after being caught out when he was stopped by a ticket inspector at Marylebone.
At the time, he pretended to have travelled from Wembley, North-West London, when questioned, and then ran off before handing himself in to cops the next day.
He was sentenced to 16-week prison sentence suspended for 12 months and ordered to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work.
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But despite dodging jail at the time, Barnett has now been banned from practising his profession by a legal regulatory body.
The Bar Standards Board said the Australian-born barrister had been disbarred after an independent tribunal on Monday, the reported.
A spokeswoman for the regulator told the newspaper: “Dishonest conduct is incompatible with membership of the Bar.
“The tribunal’s decision to disbar Dr Barnett reflects this.”
Regulators in New South Wales, Australia – where he is also qualified to work – have been informed of the board’s decision as well.
Barnett claimed in court the sum lost by Chiltern Railways was £5,892.70.
But prosecutors argued that penalty fare rules took the total to £19,689.
Sentencing him in October, Deputy District Judge Olalekan Omotosho told him his serial fare-skipping was a “serious offence”.
He said: “You had it all. It remains unclear why you acted so badly.”
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