Leading family lawyer loses high-profile client

Ayesha Vardag, the family lawyer who acted for German heiress Katrin Radmacher before being replaced by Farrer & Co this summer, has lost a second high-profile client, Solicitors Journal has learned.

Vardag acted for Katrin Radmacher from the beginning of her case against former husband Nicolas Granatino through to the appeal hearing at the Supreme Court earlier this year. Simon Bruce, partner at Farrer & Co, replaced Vardag in the summer (see solicitorsjournal.com, 13 October 2010).

Nivin El-Gamal, an Egyptian interior designer linked to a billionaire member of Dubai's ruling family, parted company with Vardag in September.

El-Gamal, who claimed asylum in the UK last year, was reported by the The Times in January as saying she was living in fear and concerned for the welfare of her one-year-old son, Saeed.

El-Gamal, currently represented by family law specialists Sears Tooth, is challenging Vardag's bill at a taxation hearing at the Senior Courts Costs Office later this month.

Vardag, who declined to comment on El-Gamal, was interviewed by Bloomberg News and the BBC, including the Today programme, in the wake of last week's Supreme Court judgment in the Radmacher case.

She qualified as a solicitor at Linklaters before being called to the Bar in 1999 and then joining Sears Tooth. She founded Ayesha Vardag solicitors in 2005, which incorporated as Vardags in May this year.

According to the firm's website, its experience is primarily in acting for 'high-earning professionals or their families, often City-based, where the dominant financial feature is income and assessment of maintenance payments and the main asset is frequently the family home' and 'high-net-worth, often high-profile, individuals, or their families, where the main financial issue is division of capital on a clean-break basis'.

The website said many of the cases 'involved ground-breaking decisions by the courts' and had been featured in law reports or in newspaper headlines.

'As relationships are changing fast in our increasingly diverse society we have also dealt with cases involving the overlap of English, international and also Islamic law.'