BARCLAYS appealed yesterday against a ruling that it is legally responsible for alleged sexual assaults by a doctor paid to carry out medicals on new hires.

Gordon Bates performed medical assessments on Barclays employees and job applicants in north-east England for nearly 20 years, and is said to have sexually assaulted 126 people, mostly young women, some of whom were just 16 years old.

The former GP, who died aged 73 in 2009, is alleged to have carried out unnecessarily intimate examinations on the claimants in a consulting room in his home in Newcastle.

A Northumbria Police investigation in 2013 uncovered sufficient evidence to prosecute Bates, had he been alive, regarding 48 alleged victims.

Last July, the High Court ruled Barclays would be “vicariously liable” for any proven assaults, but the bank claims that the doctor was a “self-employed … independent contractor” and it should not be held responsible for any proven attacks.

In the Court of Appeal yesterday, Barclays’s silk Edwards Faulks said Bates was “clearly” not employed by the bank “in the conventional sense,” as he did not have a contract or a salary and was paid a set fee for each examination.

He said Bates’s work for Barclays was a “comparatively minor part of his overall practice,” which included work for hospitals, insurance companies, a mining firm and a government board, as well as writing a newspaper column.

Lizanne Gumbel QC, for the claimants, said Bates was “plainly acting on behalf of the bank,” pointing out that examination forms were “headed with Barclays’s own logo.”

She said that “by engaging Dr Bates in the way that they did the bank created a risk of abuse.”

Judgement in the case was reserved.