Arbab Khalil

Findings — machine-extracted (anthropic-batch:claude-opus-4-8); verify against the decision

Arbab Khalil, an unregistered barrister, submitted to Cardiff University in January 2024 a BTC-LLM dissertation that had a 99% match with work submitted to another university. The Tribunal rejected his account that he had authored and sold the work, finding he had deliberately misled the Tribunal and that he knew the work was not his and passed it off as his own - dishonest conduct under the Ivey test. Cardiff commenced an academic misconduct investigation on 2 February 2024, of which he was aware, but he failed to disclose it to Lincoln's Inn before his call to the Bar on 21 March 2024, contrary to his ongoing duty under the call declaration. The failure to disclose was found discreditable (not alleged as dishonest). All charges proved; he was disbarred and ordered to pay GBP 2,670 costs.

Duties found breached:

• No baseless or threatened misconduct report

Aggravating factors:

• Conduct was intentional, not inadvertent or through misunderstanding
• Calculated and planned dishonesty
• Failure to self-report the investigation to the Inn
• Lack of insight into the seriousness of his conduct

Mitigating factors:

• At entry of the profession with no real professional experience
• Less likely the conduct would be repeated
• No previous findings of any kind against him