Did you or someone you know use to be a client of the Immigration Advisory Service ?
Statement from ILPA:
On Tuesday 28th February, at the hearing of the Joint Administrators’ application for directions as to what to do with the files that were in the Immigration Advisory Service (IAS) archive at the time when IAS went into administration, the Chief Registrar, Mr Registrar Baister, ordered that a retrieval period be opened, from now til 28 May 2012, during which former IAS clients can request their files from the archive.
The Order of Mr Registrar Baister, the Administrators’ notice and the application form for retrieving a file can be found at http://www.ilpa.org.uk/resources.php/14268/clients-can-retrieve-immigration-advisory-service-archived-files-28-february-2012
ILPA intervened in the proceedings and we are enormously grateful to Sarah Robinson and Craig Montgomery of Freshfields and their colleagues and to Georgina Peters of South Square Chambers for the superb representation they provided pro bono which enabled us to participate in this case. We were successful in our arguments against the destruction of the files. We had argued for the files to be retained for the full six years but in all the circumstances (in private law cases the “there is no money” argument goes a long way we achieved much more than we ever dared expect in managing to get the three month retrieval period.
The Chief Registrar joined the OISC, Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Law Society to the proceedings although none of them attended the hearing. We do hope that these proceedings will force an examination of the situation whereby no provision is made to ensure that promises made to clients to store their files are respected in cases of OISC regulated organisations that close down
