Mr Rihan sued EY after being forced out of his job back in 2014.

In 2013, Mr Rihan led an audit that discovered Dubai’s biggest gold refiner Kaloti had paid out a total of $5.2bn (£4bn) in cash in 2012. Mr Rihan argued it was evidence of money laundering, but EY didn’t report the activity to the authorities.

Last year, a BBC Panorama investigation revealed the smuggled gold Mr Rihan discovered at Kaloti was owned by a criminal gang that laundered money for British drug dealers.

The gang had collected cash from UK drug dealers and other European countries. They then laundered the money by buying and selling black-market gold.

Documents seen by Panorama and French news agency Premieres Lignes highlighted that Renade International - a company owned by a member of the money laundering gang - sold $146m (£114m) of gold to Kaloti in 2012 alone.

Twenty-seven members of the money laundering gang were jailed in France in 2017 whilst Kaloti denies having committed any crime.

Panorama saw a number of drafts of a Kaloti compliance report to a Dubai regulator. In the initial report, Kaloti seemed to admit buying gold coated with silver. It said: “We acknowledge an incident… with the bars coated with silver.”

But EY rewrote the report so that it said: “We acknowledge transactions… in which there were certain documentary irregularities.”

On Friday, Mr Justice Kerr ruled that EY’s behaviour amounted to professional misconduct, and that EY bosses were “responsible for suggesting to Kaloti that it should draft its compliance report in a manner that masked the reality of the Morocco gold issue”

The court also found that the firm breached the Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants, and that it had a duty of care to take reasonable steps to protect Mr Rihan “against economic loss, in the form of loss of future employment opportunity, by providing an ethically safe work environment, free from professional misconduct”.

The court awarded Mr Rihan $10,843,941 in US dollars and £117,950 in damages.