Metro Bank: Fletcher had sole access to accounts
A solicitor who misappropriated £1m from his law firm and forged bank records to cover it up has been struck off.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal said Jude Sebastian Fletcher misled both staff at his firm, Fletcher Day, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority “over a sustained period”.
He qualified in 1999 and was understood to have changed his name to Jude Grammer in November 2020 but by the time of the hearing had reverted to his original name.
The tribunal, which went ahead in Mr Fletcher’s absence, heard that the SRA intervened in the firm in February 2023, having been alerted that HM Revenue & Customs had issued a winding-up petition against it for an outstanding debt of £1.2m.
The last client account reconciliation was carried out in September 2022, indicating that the firm held sufficient funds to meet client liabilities. This included a statement from Metro Bank, provided by Mr Fletcher to the firm’s cashier, showing that it was holding £2.1m of client funds.
The firm’s officers told the SRA that they were not aware of any Metro accounts and did not have access to them – they believed the firm banked with Lloyds. It turned out that Mr Fletcher had sole access to the Metro accounts.
There was, the SRA discovered, a client account shortfall at Fletcher Day of £2.1m.
The SRA was not able to identify fully the cause of the shortfall but found that, between January and July 2022, £1m in payments were made from the Metro account to ‘Jude Grammer’, purportedly in relation to a property sale and the sale of shares in a company – but Mr Fletcher had no interest in the former and was not a director of the latter.
The SDT said: “The tribunal found that these payments represented the removal of client funds for Mr Fletcher’s own benefit. They were not accidental, nor were they connected to any legitimate client matter. They were deliberate withdrawals carried out by the only person capable of authorising them.”
In December 2020, Mr Fletcher had provided the SRA with a client account reconciliation that included a Metro Bank statement showing a balance of £1.1m; the bank subsequently confirmed that the true balance at that time was £750.
Metro also had no record of a letter in its name confirming the same that Mr Fletcher had given to the SRA.
The SDT said it was “satisfied that both the statement and the letter were false documents that Mr Fletcher had created (or caused to be created) in order to conceal his misappropriation of client funds”. It found the same for the later Metro statement that he gave to the cashier.
It concluded: “The tribunal decided that in view of the serious nature of the misconduct, in that it involved repeated acts of dishonesty, the only appropriate and proportionate sanction, in order to protect the public, and maintain public confidence in the integrity of the profession and the provision of legal services, was to order that Mr Fletcher be struck off the roll.”
He was also ordered to pay costs of £65,000.