Metro Bank: Closure of account led solicitor into misconduct
A solicitor who “exploited and misled” the Zimbabwean women she claimed to be empowering has been struck off.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) said Julian Condliffe, better known as Julie, also misled the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) and the court over a property transaction in which “inexperienced investors” were led to believe they were buying the freehold but failed to receive it.
Ms Condliffe, who grew up in Harare, was a social mobility ambassador for the Law Society and is the author of books on property auctions and strategies for investing in property, among others.
The tribunal said Ms Condliffe’s “dishonest actions in relation to the investors” were planned and “she acted in breach of the trust placed in her as both a solicitor and a property investor”.
She “exploited and misled a vulnerable community”, misleading investors “deliberately and repeatedly over a significant period of time”.
Her misconduct had “a significant impact on the wider community and, in particular, on the Zimbabwean women she claimed to be empowering”.
Ms Condliffe was born in 1978 and admitted as a solicitor in 2012. She worked for PropertyPro World (PPW), a private property company which was not a firm of solicitors, as sole director from April 2017 to June 2020.
She later set up Creative Legal Solutions Solicitors, a conveyancing practice in Northamptonshire, of which she was the sole owner and compliance officer. The law firm was shut down by the SRA in January 2025.
In October 2018, three individuals, all of whom were nurses and friends, “entered into arrangements” with Ms Condliffe in relation to a residential property in County Durham owned by PPW.
They came to her through the Zimbabwean community, in which she was “well known and influential”, the SDT said. One of them described her as “famous amongst the Zimbabwean community”.
The investors spent £28,000 on the intended purchase, a further £3,000 on a “sourcing fee” to PPW and £3,720 on renovations.
The SDT said they understood that they were purchasing the freehold and their intention was to renovate the property and sell it on as soon as possible for a profit.
However, Ms Condliffe did not transfer the title and instead spoke about a residential purchase lease option, also described as a lease option to buy.
The SDT found that she had dishonestly misled the investors into believing the property would be transferred to them.
The investors’ records indicated this, while Ms Condliffe provided the tribunal with a management agreement that she said was sent to the investors in 2018 and supported her case. However, it detailed an address for PPW that it did not occupy until 2020. This “gravely damaged” her credibility.
The SDT said that the investors also received “no independent legal advice, no signed documentation or any clear contractual framework”.
Though Ms Condliffe did not formally act for the investors as their solicitor, she gave them legal advice and therefore there was a conflict of interest because she was involved on behalf of the seller.
It was “inconceivable” that Ms Condliffe did not know “the basic contractual requirements for an option transaction of this kind, and her failure to be satisfied that appropriate safeguards were in place was inexplicable, irrespective of the fact she was not acting in a legal capacity”.
Ms Condliffe was also found to have acted dishonestly in telling the SRA in February 2022 that the investors had entered into a standard common-law management tenancy with an option to purchase the property, when “no genuine option arrangement existed”.
The investors issued county court proceedings against PPW in December 2021. The claim was ultimately settled by a payment of £19,000 to the investors.
However, Ms Condliffe was found to have acted dishonestly by telling Birmingham County Court, in a defence document signed in January 2023, that the investors “wanted a residential purchase lease option until such time as they were ready to finalise registration of the property”.
The solicitor separately admitted that she transferred money from her law firm’s client account to the Tide platform, a business account which was not designated as a client bank account and which had financial restrictions limiting the value of receipts and payments.
The SDT said that after she received a closure notice from Metro Bank in June 2024, Ms Condliffle began transferring money to Tide, which was “a financial platform not a bank” and its own terms “explicitly excluded businesses that held or controlled client funds”.
Nevertheless, Ms Condliffe transferred client balances of over £2.5m to it. The platform’s payment caps caused “serious harm” to at least one client, who was “in significant distress” after her completion money of £1.1m was “stranded” for 23 days because of Tide’s £1m payment cap.
The tribunal rejected an allegation that Creative had provided inaccurate information to the SRA about its bank accounts.
Ms Condliffe was struck off and ordered to pay costs of nearly £48,000.