By David Young-
A solicitor who took advantage of a vulnerable widow by overcharging her more than £250,000 has been struck off the roll.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal found that Jayesh Sasdev, admitted in 1987, spent at least six years working on the administration of an estate and knew his client trusted him, but all the time she was unaware he was transferring massive sums and depleting the funds.
Sasdev “targeted his client’s vulnerability, preying on her lack of English”, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) found, taking “excessive and unjustified” fees from the estate in doing so.
This included charging Razia Idrees £75,000 for storing her husband’s firm’s files at his offices, up to £10,000 in estate agent’s commission (of 2.5%) for selling the firm’s office and the couple’s house, and for liaising with Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) in relation to his own conduct.
Ms Idrees’s husband’s firm (called ‘ADC’ in the ruling) held some 7,659 files, documents and items at its offices when he died in 2010 and Mr Sasdev was instructed.
He fraudulently charged up to £75,000 to store documents at his firm’s premises, up to £10,000 for ‘estate agents commission,’ and made a number of other excessive and unjustified charges all for the purposes of illegally maximising profits.
Sasdev also failed to provide adequate or accurate costs information and failed to wind up the estate promptly, later putting pressure on her not to complain to the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
Examining the case against him, the tribunal said: ‘His conduct was deliberate, calculated and repeated. He had targeted his client’s vulnerability, preying on her lack of English. He had caused her to fear the SRA so that she would not make any contact with them, or voice any complaint about his conduct; he had coerced his client into not communicating with the SRA. It was a pattern of behaviour that had continued throughout his retainer and had continued thereafter with the delivery of his final bill.’
Once ADC’s offices were sold in 2012, the solicitor told her that they occupied over 2,000 sq ft of his own offices. When the SRA eventually intervened in ADC in 2019, by which time the matter had been passed to another firm, 441 boxes were recovered and the SRA estimated that they could have been stored at a specialist facility for around £2,000 a year.
Between December 2013 and May 2016, Mr Sasdev raised 78 interim bills – all lacking any detail –and transferred £168,000 from funds already on the estate’s ledgers.
In December 2021, he purported to send a final bill of £257,000, less the money already recovered.
Mr Sasdev did not accept that the charges were excessive or unjustified, saying the final bill particularised the work undertaken, but also told Ms Idrees that he did not expect her to pay what was still owed.
The SDT rejected his arguments: “The submission and evidence that commercial rental rates were an appropriate comparator but that storage rental rates were not, when Mr Sasdev was charging for storage, was rejected by the tribunal as wholly without merit.
“The tribunal found that there was no cost to Mr Sasdev of storing the files at the office. His evidence made clear that the firm did not lose any revenue (for example from a potential tenant) by holding the files. The tribunal noted that Ms Idrees and her sister had suggested alternative arrangements, but that Mr Sasdev had rejected those as unsuitable.”
Sasdev, who was the sole equity owner of Ilford firm Archer Fields Solicitors, had been instructed following the death of the client’s husband, who was the sole principal of a legal practice. The former offices of this practice were sold for £280,000 and Sasdev charged commission in relation to this sale even though there was no agreement with the client.
The client did not speak English as her first language and was trying to care for a two-year-old child as well as administer her husband’s estate.
The deceased’s practice held around 7,600 files and documents at its former premises, and the tribunal heard that Sasdev told the client and her sister that he would have to rent a two-bedroom house for £1,200 a month to store all the boxes.
The client received nothing in writing confirming the storage costs. The SRA’s subsequent inquiries found that the annual cost should have been around £2,000.
Sasdev also charged for text messages and for communication with the SRA in relation to his conduct of this matter.
Sasdev, representing himself, did not accept that charges were excessive or unjustified and submitted that he acted honestly at all time: if he had charged for any matters that he should not have done, this was a genuine mistake. He argued that the senior courts costs office was the appropriate venue for a dispute over costs, not the tribunal.
The SDT also concluded that Mr Sasdev had failed to co-operate with the SRA and tried to prevent his client and her sister doing so either. When they did speak to the regulator, “Mr Sasdev tried to tell them what to say” and also wrote letters in their names.
Further, Mr Sasdev failed to distribute or otherwise deal with £280,000 of residual client balances at ADC, and did not deliver accountant’s reports for the last two years of Archer Fields’ operation.
Ms Idrees told the tribunal she could no longer trust solicitors. She said she felt betrayed and psychologically exhausted, and was “shocked how he could get away with what he has done to me”.
In striking him off, the SDT said Mr Sasdev had been “motivated by his desire for personal financial gain”.
“His conduct was deliberate, calculated and repeated. He had targeted his client’s vulnerability, preying on her lack of English.”
The tribunal found his evidence was ‘not credible’ and that it was impossible to determine what work had been carried out. It was accepted that the client had not received any interim invoices, which were left ‘deliberately obscure’ so that Sasdev could not be questioned when he finally presented the bill.
It was found that Sasdev was motivat