Tribunal ousts Sharelle Harris for dishonesty in botched property deal

SDT finds dishonest statements and due-diligence failures; strike-off and £19,500 costs

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off Sharelle Camelia Harris after finding she acted dishonestly in a residential conveyancing matter and failed to carry out proper anti-money laundering checks. The tribunal also ordered her to pay £19,500 in costs.

Harris, admitted in 2003, was a director of Lester Dominic Solicitors Limited in Finchley, north London. The case was heard on 15 September 2015 before Mr S. Tinkler (chair), Miss N. Lucking and Mr S. Marquez. Harris did not attend and was unrepresented. She had emailed seeking an adjournment, citing post-natal health issues, but provided no medical evidence despite being asked. The panel treated the request as an adjournment application, refused it, and proceeded in her absence, noting her prolonged failure to engage with the proceedings.

The central allegations arose from the 2013 sale of a leasehold property in Tottenham owned by Harris’s client, HM. The title carried a registered charge in favour of Mortgage Express, and a restriction preventing disposition without the lender’s consent. Contracts were exchanged on 19 April 2013, completion took place on 3 May 2013, and £141,750 was received from the buyer’s solicitors, TW&C. After paying the estate agent, the firm transferred the balance—two payments of £100,000 and £53,336—to the client the same day. No monies were sent to redeem the Mortgage Express charge.

From late July 2013, TW&C chased confirmation that the mortgage had been redeemed. On 26 July 2013 Harris wrote stating the mortgage “was redeemed on the day of completion” and that she was “chasing” the lender for discharge. The same afternoon she emailed the client asking for the mortgage account number because the file contained no details. The tribunal found that Harris then repeated false and misleading statements on 12 August and 5 September 2013, and caused an email on 20 September 2013 to be sent asserting the client had redeemed the loan himself. There was no evidence of redemption by the firm or the client, and the client ledger showed the net sale proceeds had already been remitted. The panel held that the 12 August, 5 September and 20 September communications were dishonest by the standards of reasonable and honest people and that Harris knew they were dishonest when sent. It considered the 26 July letter highly likely to be dishonest but could not be sure to the criminal standard.

The tribunal further found that Harris failed to carry out proper customer due diligence on the seller in breach of the Money Laundering Regulations 2007. No identification documents were on the file and a blank customer due diligence form had been left incomplete. Although Harris later stated she had seen ID in earlier dealings with the client, she could not produce records, and none were found on other files.

In a separate matter, the panel found that during a July 2013 call with a financial broker, Harris falsely asserted that her firm had three partners when in fact it had two—herself and fellow director Lester Kan. She blamed the Law Society for not updating its records and suggested a third partner had joined recently. The tribunal accepted evidence that no such partner existed and concluded the statements were dishonest, made to satisfy a lender’s requirement for three-partner firms.

An allegation that Harris had breached undertakings on 2 May 2013 was not proved; the tribunal considered the TA13 responses and the Law Society’s Code for Completion by Post created ambiguity and could not be read as a clear undertaking to redeem the mortgage. A further allegation that she failed to respond to an SRA letter dated 31 March 2014 was also not proved because receipt could not be established.

In sanction, the tribunal applied the principles in Bolton v Law Society and noted that dishonesty almost invariably results in strike-off absent exceptional circumstances. It found multiple dishonest acts across two matters, a lack of insight, and harm arising from the unredeemed charge and ensuing litigation risk. It ordered that Harris be struck off the Roll and that she pay £19,500 towards the SRA’s costs, reduced from the total sought to reflect the allegations not proved and the shorter hearing.