Four years for doctor in sexual assaults on patients

Shrivas Kini, 62, of Grange Croft, Sheffield, inappropriately touched the women as they underwent treatment at centres he ran in Leeds.

One woman shouted “I hope you rot” as the doctor was taken down to the cells at Leeds Crown Court yesterday.

A jury heard that Kini was arrested in December 2010 after a patient claimed that he had touched her inappropriately during laser hair removal treatment.

She said she had attended five appointments at Kini’s clinic in Stanningley, during which he became increasingly tactile, hugging and kissing her.

When giving evidence, the woman wept as she told the court that Kini had been unable to keep his hands to himself.

An earlier complaint had been made about Kini in 2006, when a patient at his West Park clinic said he had hugged her while she was topless.

Jurors were unanimous in finding Kini guilty of sexual assault in relation to the 2006 allegation. They convicted him by 10 to one of assault by penetration over the 2010 incident.

Kini was cleared of a third charge of indecent assault, which related to an allegation made by a 17-year-old girl while he was a GP working in Pontefract in 2003.

The doctor had denied all three counts and told the jury: “I know my boundaries.”

The court heard that he was a father of two grown-up children and had no previous convictions.

Judge James Spencer QC, sentencing, told Kini that his victims’ experiences “must have been upsetting in the extreme”.

The judge said: “Throughout your professional life you have been a doctor. “You have children, you are a married man and have enjoyed the status and trust of a doctor in your meeting with your patients and your customers in the laser treatment centres.

“You have enjoyed that trust and you have needed it in order to do your job and it is a significant trust as you know from your own experience and the expert evidence we have heard in this case, and you abused that trust.”

The judge told Kini that if he knew the boundaries, he had “certainly breached them”.

“That aggravates your case because what you did was, when these women were in a state of undress and for your own sexual purposes, you assaulted them,” he added.

Richard Reed, for Kini, said: “The effect of this conviction will obviously be profound on him.

“All the evidence we have heard is that he is a very competent practitioner.”

Kini qualified as a doctor in India in 1976 and has also worked in Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, King’s Lynn and Barnsley.

He was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and worked in A&E departments before becoming a GP.