The conviction of a Scottish taxi driver who asked two young women for sex after their failure to pay the fare upfront has been reinstated.
Faisal Aziz will now have to sign the Sex Offenders Register as his appeal against his conviction by a lower court is dismissed.
The women, aged 18 and 21, hailed him when he was driving his Volkswagen Passat in Edinburgh city centre in the early hours of October 5, 2019. Aziz pulled up and picked them up despite his licence being restricted to pre-booked passengers. But when the duo said they could pay the fare only after reaching their destination, the cabbie said, “What else can you offer…sex?”
Following the argument, he drove off leaving the passengers in an empty street but the duo managed to snap a photo of the car’s number plate.
In August this year, appeal Sheriff Alasdair MacFadyen ruled that Aziz’s remark had not been sexually motivated and reduced his conviction to a breach of the peace.
As the case was taken to the High Court appeal court, Lord Justice General Carloway disagreed with MacFadyen’s ruling that the taxi driver’s proposition was “different from obtaining sexual gratification.”
Lord Carloway said there was a “significant sexual aspect” to what Aziz had told the passengers and “that is exactly what his request was.”
He said young women who have been drinking are entitled to protection from “predatory males seeking sexual favours in exchange for fares”.
“Whether the expectation was for immediate, or deferred, gratification does not matter. The only defence open would have been to raise the issue of a reasonable belief that the complainers consented”, he said in a written summary, reported by the Daily Record.
“That might have been open had the communication been made in a social setting and between persons known to each other. It could hardly have been available in a situation involving strangers in the relationship of potential taxi driver and passenger in the public street where the passenger’s obvious desire is to go home and not to indulge in sexual activity,” Lord Carloway said.
