Home Office: Solicitor sent misleading document
A partner who misled his client and his supervising partner about the progress of the client’s visa application has been struck off.
Ahmed Ajina also instructed a paralegal to provide misleading information to another client.
Mr Ajina, who qualified in 2014, was the sole solicitor in the litigation department of London firm Seddons (now Seddons GSC) acting on immigration matters.
He was expelled from the partnership in May 2021, having self-reported to his supervising partner that, in April 2020, he had told the partner that Client A’s application was on hold indefinitely due to the pandemic, when he had actually been told in December 2019 that the application was unsuccessful.
He also admitted telling Client A in October 2020 that his business plan – the first step in a two-stage process to acquire UK residency through the innovator visa scheme – had been successful, knowing that it had not.
Finally, in February 2021, he provided misleading wording for the supervising partner to update Client A with the progress of his application, despite the fact that it had already been rejected.
Meanwhile, in January 2021, Mr Ajina instructed a paralegal to tell another client that the firm had only recently received an email from the Home Office, when actually it had been received two months earlier but not acted on.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) also found that, in or around May 2020, Mr Ajina altered elements of an agreement submitted the Home Office in relation to a third client, knowing it would be relied on but was not true.
It decided that Mr Ajina had acted dishonestly and breached various principles; his actions had involved “a significant abuse of trust”, especially in relation to the first client, given the length of time the misconduct lasted, denying them the opportunity to explore alternatives.
Given his level of experience and responsibility as a partner, “he should have known that his conduct was a material breach of professional obligations”.
Though Mr Ajina had a previously unblemished career, self-reported his conduct to the firm and co-operated with the Solicitors Regulation Authority, these matters had “limited weight… given the likelihood of discovery”.
The SDT concluded that a strike-off was the only appropriate sanction.
It reduced the costs payable to the SRA from £67,000 to just under £40,000, given that Seddons’ investigation had provided much of what the regulator needed, while the involvement of three senior fee-earners was “disproportionate relative to the overall complexity of the case”.
