A duty legal aid solicitor has been cleared of an allegation that he took £250 in a car park from a client - after an investigation lasting five years.
Mohammed Yousef was accused by the Solicitors Regulation Authority of taking the payment following a police interview with his client in 2021 in London. But the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal rejected the client’s claims and accepted Yousef’s submission that he received no payment, describing him as an ‘honest and credible’ witness.
The tribunal said it was ‘unfortunate’ that the client’s evidence had been accepted at face value and without question.
Yousef, who worked for east Midlands firm Bhatia Best, had failed to open a client file after the police interview and later admitted to creating entries on the firm’s case management system that indicated work had been carried out two months earlier. His representative acknowledged before the tribunal that his administrative paperwork was ‘laggard, chaotic and haphazard’. The tribunal concluded ‘this was due to the nature of his work as an overwhelmed criminal duty solicitor engaged with legal aid work, worsened by the impact of the pandemic’.
The SRA, prosecuting, had relied on text messages which recorded the client asking what the fees were. She later claimed that Yousef told her she was required to pay £250 and that he did not advise her of her entitlement to free police station representation.
Yousef had talked in a text about being paid in cash, but he explained this was in reference to a payment for hardwood flooring that he was selling and that the client had enquired about.
In cross-examination Yousef said that ‘not one penny had changed hands’ and he denied receiving any payment from the client or acting without the firm’s knowledge and consent. He explained that in this case, he had failed to open a file in a timely fashion because of the chaos attendant on an overworked duty solicitor in a busy team who had not caught up with the administrative tasks his job required.
Yousef was dismissed by his firm and a subsequent appeal was unsuccessful. He told the tribunal that after his dismissal, he received nuisance calls from a withheld number where he could hear the client laughing.
Yousef’s representative told the tribunal the impact of the proceedings had been ‘profound’ for the solicitor who had qualified in 2019. He had suffered from delays and five years of investigation by the SRA which had caused serious anxiety and had a very damaging effect on his mental health and morale. The tribunal said that while Yousef should bear some blame for adding the wrong dates, he had not been dishonest and this was a one-off event.
The SRA reduced its costs application from £77,000 to £15,000 to reflect the tribunal’s findings. The tribunal awarded £10,000.
