Watchdog rules IVF doctor should lose legal responsibility for London clinic
Tuesday, 24 July 2007
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A controversial IVF doctor is to lose legal responsibility for one of his clinics. Mohamed Taranissi must appoint another person to be in legal charge of his Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecology Centre in London, the fertility watchdog has decided.
Mr Taranissi will be able to treat patients at the clinic and will be its medical director. But he must appoint another "person responsible" for the Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecology Centre (ARGC) in the next three weeks if the centre is to continue to operate.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) licence committee met earlier this month to discuss Mr Taranissi's licence. It concluded he had been in breach of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act by treating "significant numbers" of patients at a second London clinic, the Reproductive Genetics Institute (RGI), without an appropriate licence.
It also said it did not accept Mr Taranissi was justified in thinking his ARGC licence also covered the RGI. But it said it accepted Mr Taranissi's explanation for not registering the RGI with the Healthcare Commission as being "inadvertent rather than deliberate".
Mr Taranissi's solicitor said the doctor intended to challenge the ruling.
Last month, the High Court ruled that search warrants used by the authority to raid Mr Taranissi's clinics were unlawful. The HFEA said it accepted that a statement used to obtain the warrants in January was not "legally watertight".
Mr Taranissi was the subject of a BBC Panorama programme broadcast on the same day as the raids. He is now suing the BBC over that programme. He had indicated to the HFEA that he would not seek a treatment licence for the RGI ahead of yesterday's decision.
One has not been offered by the HFEA, although a storage licence for that clinic will remain in force. The licence committee said if a new "person responsible'' was appointed for the ARGC, it would grant a licence for a further six months, during which time Mr Taranissi can be nominal licensee.
Mr Taranissi said : "We are pleased to have been told that we can continue to work and my priority now is my patients. The new licence is not for as long as we had hoped for, but we are confident that this will be extended and that we can put the unpleasant past behind us and concentrate on doing what we do best, albeit that I shall still be appealing against certain findings of fact that were made."
He added: "The current situation follows the events in January of this year when the chief executive of the HFEA gave what was later described by a High Court judge as 'seriously defective' and 'highly misleading' evidence to a magistrate to obtain warrants to raid our clinic. The High Court subsequently found these warrants had been unlawfully obtained and we are similarly confident that the grounds for this latest decision will be shown to be wrong.''
