A law firm owner has been fined for a third time after admitting to a string of accounts rule breaches.
Sarinjit Singh Bahia, admitted in 1993 and sole director and owner of Birmingham firm Consilium Legal Limited, prepared accounts for an estate which misleadingly stated ‘no fee to be charged’ when the firm knew he had already billed £5,000.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority, prosecuting, dropped an allegation of dishonesty and proposed an agreed outcome with Bahia that he would be fined £5,000
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal considered this proposal and invited the parties to revise the sanction to reflect the seriousness of the admitted conduct.
After one revised suggestion was rejected for being too low, the tribunal approved a £15,000 fine, as well as an order for £20,000 costs.
The tribunal said the misconduct was ‘seriously aggravated’ by the solicitor's previous regulatory history. Bahia had appeared before the SDT twice before: in 2007 he was fined £1,175 for bringing the profession into disrepute following a conviction for assault by beating and in 2019 he was fined £30,000 for failing to do proper checks on a third party in a property sale.
In the latest case, Bahia admitted giving wrong and misleading information about the charges being made to an estate account, saying that the firm had presented an outdated charging template. He admitted this was a careless and inadvertent mistake.
The same error was made on an estate account prepared in 2020 which again said there had been no fee charged, when in fact the firm had billed a total of £20,000.
Bahia further admitted that his firm caused a client account shortage when he retained around £28,000 in his personal bank account for more than two years. The SRA accepted that Bahia had been nominated by the late client to receive a lump sum payment on his death, but said that the solicitor was not authorised to receive it.
In a further admitted allegation, Bahia also admitted to misusing £13,560 of client money intended to meet a stamp duty land tax liability. He said this was an inadvertent error due to the lack of a bookkeeper at the firm.
In mitigation not agreed with the SRA, Bahia said he had changed since the time of the allegations, having had therapy to deal with issues affecting his life at the time.
As well as being fined, the solicitor was made subject to conditions for seven years which prevent him acting as a manager, owner or compliance officer of any firm. He is also barred from holding or receiving client money or having the power to authorise any money transfers. His firm was made subject to intervention in 2021.
