By Lucy Caulkett-
A solicitor who transferred £90,000 from the client account to pay off a tax bill has been struck off the roll and fined £18,000. Major Singh-Raud, who practised from his firm in Stockport for 17 years, transferred the huge sum days before the Solicitors Regulation Authority intervened to close him down over concerns about account rule breaches.
42 year old Singh-Raud told the SRA intervention he had made the transfer to ensure that HM Revenue & Customs, which had served him a statutory demand for £195,000 five months earlier, did not declare him bankrupt. He admitted failing to pay disbursements, saying he could not manage his day to day caseload and that the general management of the office had become too much.
The crooked solicitor admitted the money was withdrawn from the client account in October 2017, sending the bulk of it to HMRC and £10,000 to the client account to cover damages that were due to be paid to clients. In his defence, he said the failure to adhere to correct procedure was an ‘innocent oversight’ and not inherently dishonest.
However, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal concluded that Singh-Raud was making a late justification for the improper use of monies that ought to have remained in the client account. At the time of the transfer that the solicitor ‘was more concerned with avoiding bankruptcy than he was in complying with [accounts rules]’, according to the judgement. The judgement added: ‘Even on [his own] case, he knew that he had taken client monies to which he was not entitled, to satisfy a personal debt.’
Singh-Raud was also condemned for failing to pay professional disbursements which had been deposited into the office account. He was found out after a report to the SRA in January 2017 from a company instructed to conduct more than 305 medical examinations for personal injury claims which subsequently settled. The company calculated a debt of over £58,000.