Mayor wins libel damages after false BNP sex claim

| Wednesday, 26 April 2006 Source: Press Association

A mayor accepted undisclosed libel damages today over a British National Party claim that he had been struck off the medical register for having sex with a female patient.

Dr Raj Chandran, a GP and the Mayor of the Borough of Gedling, in Nottinghamshire was not prepared to let the unfounded allegations on the BNP website go unchallenged, said solicitor Matthew Himsworth.

He told Mr Justice Eady at London's High Court that the article about Dr Chandran, a former Commissioner of the Commission for Racial Equality, appeared on the website in November last year.

Headed 'Race commissioner caught with his trousers down', it falsely alleged that Dr Chandran had been struck off by the General Medical Council, having been found guilty of having sex with a female patient in exchange for the provision of drugs.

Mr Himsworth said that the BNP, press officer Dr Stuart Russell - who wrote the article - and website editor Steve Blake "freely and completely" accepted that Dr Chandran was misidentified in the article.

The doctor who was at the centre of the allegations was in fact Dr Bellipady Sudharam Rai, a completely different Nottinghamshire GP, he added.

Dr Chandran had no connection to Dr Rai and was not involved in the disciplinary proceedings in any way.

Mr Himsworth said that the defendants completely accepted that their allegations were untrue and had agreed to apologise in court, publish a prominent apology on the website and pay Dr Chandran damages and his legal costs.

Dr Russell, for the defendants, offered their very sincere apologies for getting the article wrong.

Dr Chandran is donating all the damages to Drugs Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) - his chosen charity as mayor.

Copyright Press Association 2006.