A former coalminer told a tribunal that he was “treated terribly” by a solicitors’ firm that sliced a £2,330 “success fee” from compensation he was awarded for industrial disease.

John Straw said outside the hearing that he was outraged to hear claims that the law firm, Beresfords, had earned a multimillion-pound fortune by handling claims from sick and dying miners.

The South Yorkshire firm was paid £140 million by the Government for settling tens of thousands of claims by former pit men, their widows and families.

It also earned an additional £938,000 by deducting success fees from the damages given to some of its clients, whose years of work underground had caused chronic lung disease or a disabling hand condition called vibration white finger (VWF).

Three of the miners gave evidence yesterday at the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, where the two former senior partners of the Doncaster firm, Jim Beresford, 58, and Doug Smith, 51, deny 11 charges of serious professional misconduct.

Mr Straw, 59, from Swinton, near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, told the hearing that he first contacted Beresfords in the late 1990s after his wife spotted a full-page advertisement about miners’ compensation in his local newspaper.

He had worked at Cadeby colliery for 25 years, until 1986, and suffered from emphysema, caused by the inhalation of coal dust, and VWF.

Mr Straw said that when he signed the form that permitted the law firm to deduct a success fee from any future damages he did so in the belief that no more than £1,000 would be taken.

He said he did not realise that many other solicitors’ firms were handling claims without charging any success fees. Nor did he know that the legal costs of successful claimants were being paid by the Government.

Mr Straw said he subsequently felt “very bitter” when he realised that the solicitors had taken a 25 per cent success fee from his damages.

“It cost me a lot of money. You don’t earn a lot of money down mines. If I’d known then what I know now, I would never have used Beresfords. I think I was treated terribly.

“I’m very bitter about them and what they did to me. I just can’t believe it, that he \ made so much money and he took it off me to do it. Beresfords did me, really bad.”

Cross-examined by Alan Gourgey QC, for Beresfords, about the accuracy of his recollection of a promised £1,000 succes fee limit, Mr Straw accused the barrister of “nit-picking”.

“My wife was there. Ask her that question that you’ve asked me, because she doesn’t tell lies and I don’t tell lies.”

Mr Straw said he “complained several times to the Law Society about Mr Beresford” and was finally reimbursed the £2,330 success fee in May 2004. After the hearing Mr Straw turned to another miner and said: “Me and thee went down that dusty pit for 25 years to earn him his private jet, £140 million and a mansion near Wetherby.

“I had four children and I never had a holiday in my life, because I couldn’t afford one.”

Beresfords ended its practice of claiming success fees in 2003 and refunded all the money it had kept from miners’ damages, though it has not repaid money that it deducted and passed to a trade union.

Mr Beresford and Mr Smith have both resigned from the law firm in the past few weeks. They are accused of “conduct unbecoming a solicitor” by failing to act in the best interests of their clients, misleading the Government, breaching referral rules and entering into “sham arrangements”.

Some of the allegations focus on the firm’s “dubious” financial relationship with the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, which passed thousands of lucrative claims to Beresfords.

In some of their dealings with the UDM and one its employees, Clare Walker, Mr Beresford and Mr Smith are accused of acting with dishonesty and “conscious impropriety”.

The hearing continues.

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