A lawyer specialising in winning compensation for sick miners has been named the richest in the country.
The Lawyer magazine said Jim Beresford, of Doncaster-based firm Beresfords, earned £16.75m last year.
Miners' campaigners criticised the compensation system, which gives a flat-rate fee of £2,000 to lawyers.
Mr Beresford, who lives near Wetherby, declined to comment, but a statement from the firm said it had won millions of pounds for former miners.
Respiratory problems
The firm represented workers who had suffered breathing problems from their years underground.
The money was claimed from the government's £7.5bn compensation scheme, which was set up after British Coal was found to have been negligent over respiratory diseases and vibration white finger.
An average flat-rate fee of £2,125 per claim was in turn paid to the solicitors.
Miners' campaigner Lord Lofthouse of Pontefract said that in comparison many workers had only received payouts of several hundreds of pounds or less.
'Little work'
Lord Lofthouse said: "It's absolutely appalling giving those amounts for men who worked all that time in those conditions.
"They'd be getting about £200 or £300 and the solicitors would be getting about £2,000, in my view, for very little work."
A statement from Beresfords said the company had secured more claims for former miners with respiratory problems than any other in the country - a total of £180m.
The statement said: "The level of compensation and the solicitors' fee is fixed by the court over which the firm has no control."
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