A Vancouver lawyer who once negotiated an oil trade agreement with Saddam Hussein has resigned from practice in the face of possible disbarment over allegations of "very serious" misconduct.

The Law Society of B.C. announced Wednesday that lawyer Robert Palkowski has agreed to permanently withdraw from the practice of law, and promised that he will never again apply to be a lawyer in this province.

Palkowski was scheduled to appear at a disciplinary hearing in May to face 11 allegations of professional misconduct, most of them involving his representation of convicted fraudster Frederick Gilliland.

"We felt that we had very strong evidence to prove these allegations," Stuart Cameron, the law society's director of investigations, told ctvbc.ca.

He said that if the allegations were proven, Palkowski would face "significant" discipline, including possible disbarment.

"They're very serious allegations. They would be at the higher end of the scale," Cameron said.

Although Cameron stressed that all of the allegations against Palkowski are serious, some of the most reprehensible involve how he distributed money given in trust by a friend of Gilliland for the fraudster's benefit.

Cameron said those funds -- provided by Gilliland's friend Thomas Ryan -- were paid out, "without letting Mr. Ryan know that he would not be looking out for his best interests."

Palkowski has already received a harsh tongue-lashing in B.C. Supreme Court for some of those payments, namely a "sham" he committed in securing bail for his client.

Gilliland was arrested in 2003 on allegations that he was responsible for a $29-million securities fraud spanning North America and the U.K. He was released on $750,000 bail six months later.

Palkowski said that the bail money came as a "gift" from Ryan, a resident of California.

But both Gilliland and Ryan said the money was meant to be a loan, not a gift.

"There is no way I made a gift of the money," Ryan wrote in a court affidavit.

"They advised me that I would receive the money back within four days after Fred's release from jail because he had people in Canada who would loan him the money."

Instead, the bank drafts ended up in the hands of three strangers -- sureties who were supposed to monitor Gilliland's whereabouts after his release. As it turns out, two of the three sureties had never even met Gilliland.

"None of the three had any even rudimentary idea of the role or obligation of a surety and none of them had a financial stake in ensuring that Gilliland complied with the terms of his release," Justice Glen Parrett wrote in a 2006 decision handing the $750,000 over to Gilliland's estate.

"The sureties organized and presented by Mr. Palkowski ... were nothing more than a sham calculated to frustrate the spirit and purpose of the order."

Some of the other allegations made against Palkowski by the law society include conflict of interest and charging Gilliland's estate for services that he had already been paid for.

‘I've decided to retire'

But Palkowski denies that he resigned because of the disciplinary proceedings against him.

"I just wanted to retire. I intended to basically get involved in my other business ventures," he told ctvbc.ca, declining to elaborate on the nature of those ventures.

"It was nothing to do with the disciplinary thing."

He stressed that that the allegations against him are all unproven, but said he would not comment on them further.

According to Palkowski's biography, he has worked as a representative for an American oil company, and travelled to Iraq to negotiate a counter trade agreement with Saddam Hussein. He's also served as a coroner for the province and worked with the federal department of justice.

A messy history

This is Palkowski's fourth tangle with the law society.

In 2009, he was suspended from practice for a month and ordered to pay $1,500 in costs for conduct unbecoming of a lawyer after a drunk-driving crash three years earlier.

Palkowski was convicted of impaired driving causing bodily harm for a collision on the Lions Gate Bridge that left another man with serious injuries. His blood alcohol level at the time of the crash was about three times the legal limit.

In 2004, he was ordered to pay a $2,500 fine plus costs for breaching an undertaking given to the law society that he would not act against an unrepresented client.

And two decades earlier, Palkowski was suspended from practice for 18 months after he threatened a client's creditor with criminal charges, and then lied about it in law society proceedings.