Ex-BNP Paribas lawyer fined over ‘offensive’ nicknames for colleagues

A former top lawyer at BNP Paribas has been ordered to pay £31,000 by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) after admitting to using offensive slurs and nicknames for colleagues in internal emails.

Benedict Foster - who qualified more than 30 years ago - headed up the bank’s capital markets legal team in London. He was found to have used “inappropriate, unprofessional, and/or offensive nicknames” to refer to Asian and other colleagues between December 2020 and November 2021.

Those included nicknames such as “Pol Pot”, “Jabba the Hutt” and “Hu She”, according to the tribunal, which said his “conduct was deliberate, calculated and repeated over a period of 8 months.”

The matter first hit the SRA’s radar after a January 2022 City AM article titled “BNP Paribas London executive keeps job despite naming Asian colleague ‘Hu She’”.

Foster resigned from BNP Paribas in 2022 after an internal disciplinary investigation. The matter was subsequently reported to the SRA, which then referred it to the SDT last year.

At the 4 March hearing, Foster admitted to using “unprofessional” and “offensive” monikers for colleagues and accepted his language had fallen short of professional standards. He was fined £15,000 and ordered to pay £16,000 in costs.

The SDT’s judgment was published on 21 March. You can read it here.

Bad company

If some of this sounds familiar, it might be because Foster featured in emails alongside another ex-BNP lawyer: Benoit Faure.

Screenshots of their exchanges surfaced in a 2022 RollOnFriday article about Faure’s use of offensive language. Faure was dismissed for similar conduct and resurfaced last year when he tried - unsuccessfully - to sue BNP Paribas for €1.5 million in damages over the dismissal.