SDT: Solicitor admitted he was out of his depth
A “manifestly incompetent” solicitor who facilitated one fraudulent and three potentially fraudulent property transactions has been given a suspended suspension by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT).
The tribunal said Eric Kawoya Kabuye was “ill-equipped” to run a law firm but this was because he was inept rather than unethical.
Mr Kabuye, who qualified in 2003, purchased London firm Queenscourt Law, trading as Hamilton Solicitors, in September 2021. He became sole director in June 2022 before the firm was shut down by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) in July 2023.
Mr Kabuye has since held a practising certificate subject to conditions preventing him from being owner, manager, partner or compliance officer in a law firm, and from being involved with client money.
In July 2024, the SRA granted a law firm in south London approval to employ Mr Kabuye as a consultant.
The solicitor admitted that he failed to prevent the fraudulent sale of a property worth £825,000, having not undertaken proper identity checks on the supposed sellers, meaning there was a client account shortage of that amount.
The ‘sellers’ had provided copies of Irish passports certified by ‘Mohammed Alyas of MA Solicitors’ – the SRA had issued an alert three months earlier warning of a document stamp misusing Mr Alyas’s name and telling solicitors to undertake further due diligence.
Mr Kabuye was also found to have facilitated three potentially fraudulent property sales, again having not conducted proper identity checks, leading to a potential further client account shortage of up to £1.6m.
The shortages had not been replaced when the SRA closed the firm.
The SDT said that, “in practical and functional terms”, Mr Kabuye acted as COLP and COFA, although he had not received formal written approval from the SRA to do so.
Mr Kabuye admitted also using or allowing use of the firm’s client account as a banking facility, having distributed the proceeds of sale from two of the properties to third-party accounts “without any underlying transaction” involving them.
Further, there was a “demonstrable lack of control, supervision, governance and oversight of the firm”, the SDT said.
Mr Kabuye employed staff who “had not provided a CV or undergone any formal application process”.
In one case “an employee was found to have worked at the firm for six months without providing identity documentation before being dismissed”.
It was “unclear” who had access to the firm’s premises – indeed, Mr Kabuye “lacked a clear understanding or accurate estimation of the individuals operating under the firm’s name”.
One was a non-solicitor subject to a section 43 order banning him from working for law firms without SRA permission, which Mr Kabuye did not obtain. This individual was allowed to do “high-risk transactional work”.
The SDT also held that the solicitor failed to co-operate fully with the SRA’s investigation.
But it dismissed an allegation that he failed to act with integrity. Mr Kabuje was “ill-equipped and ill-prepared to manage conveyancing transactions and to discharge the responsibilities” associated with the roles of manager, COLP and COFA.
“His failures therefore reflected a lack of competence and oversight rather than any intention to mislead, deceive or act improperly.”
The conduct around the fraudulent transactions “was the result of ineptitude rather than any conduct engaging ethical standards”.
Mr Kabuje accepted, in mitigation, that he was “out of his depth” when he assumed control of Hamilton. “He had been naïve, placed unjustified excessive trust in others and failed to question matters that required scrutiny.”
He said he had no intention of returning to any managerial or ownership role within a firm and has “permanently stepped away” from conveyancing.
The SDT said the solicitor’s manifest incompetence, “while serious, did not arise from conduct that breached ethical standards”.
It was not necessary to strike him off to protect the public, it concluded. He was suspended for six months, to be suspended for 12 months from November 2025. The tribunal ordered that the restrictions on his practice should remain.
The SRA applied for nearly £54,000 in costs. Bearing in mind Mr Kabuje’s limited means, the SDT reduced this to £7,500.
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