The General Medical Council concluded that Dr Chempakaserry Gopakumar took the opportunity during an abdominal examination to “indecently” touch a patient “with a sexual motivation”.

In August 2005, the GMC’s Fitness to Practise Panel (FPP) found him guilty of serious professional misconduct at Leeds’s Hunslet Health Centre and erased his name from the medical register.

However top judges at London’s Civil Appeal Court gave Dr Gopakumar, 67, permission to appeal the decision – after hearing the Leeds woman – known as Miss B – who made the complaint against him had a history of drug abuse.

Barrister, Ian Pennock, for Dr Gopakumar, said that, given the woman’s history, the panel should not have been given a direction by its legal advisers that “she was of good character and that her word was as good as his”.

Dr Gopakumar said he was unable to recollect the consultation but always denied he would have acted in the way alleged.

Mr Pennock said that, as well as receiving a police caution after she was a passenger in a stolen vehicle, Miss B’s medical records revealed she had used heroin.

“That clearly makes the decision unsafe,” he told the Appeal Court.

The barrister said the GP had lost his medical practise and his career because of the claims by the woman, who consulted him while he was working as a locum at Leeds’s Hunslet Health Centre in early 2004.

The FPP found these claims proved.

The panel also heard a complaint by another patient, known as Miss A, who was seen by Dr Gopakumar at a surgery in Dewsbury in October 2002.

However the FPP did not find that he had acted indecently.

In April last year, at London’s High Court, Mr Justice Underhill rejected Dr Gopakumar’s appeal against the FPP’s decision. However Lord Justice Waller and Lord Justice Rix yesterday granted him permission to appeal after hearing that Miss B’s drug issues had not been put before the judge.

Dr Gopakumar’s full appeal will now be heard at a later, unspecified, date.