No end in sight for this Axiom Ince farce

The Axiom Ince saga is one of those where it gets more ridiculous the more detail you give.

It started off with a hitherto unheralded firm which inexplicably found the cash to buy much bigger firms and developed an interest in property development.

This appeared not to pique the interest of the Solicitors Regulation Authority, which presumably thought nothing of the owners of a smaller practice buying an international shipping firm like Ince & Co. Once investigators did pay a visit - after three months - they clearly saw something that required three directors to be suspended, albeit not for another couple of weeks. The SRA then waited another six weeks or so before closing down the firm.

In the meantime, a black hole of £66m had appeared and was unaccounted for. It is unknown how much of this money went missing in the months it took between Axiom buying Ince and the final SRA intervention.

The Legal Services Board clearly saw enough to merit an investigation into what the SRA was doing about this. A report was promised by the spring, but its publication was postponed by the calling of a general election (no, I don’t understand how the outcome of an investigation into the SRA was going to swing the vote either).

Anyway, the election came and went two months ago, and, according to the LSB, the independent investigator's report has been delivered. On 9 July, it said it was considering the next steps.

An end in sight? Not likely. It turned out that the next steps were to do nothing – at least publicly. The report has sat on the to-do pile all summer with no apparent urgency to act on it or even to give a date when it might be published.

It doesn’t seem to be clear why the report itself cannot be published while the LSB considers the next steps. Again, we are not told.

Meanwhile, the SRA had that black hole to fill and decided that solicitors would have to provide the soil. Contributions to the compensation fund (depleted by Axiom Ince clients understandably wanting their money back) were to shoot up to pay for such a costly intervention. Solicitors were apparently an inexhaustible source of funds, given they were also forking out for the costs of the report into the SRA.

The only problem in raising contributions was that the LSB had to approve it. But the LSB had taken so long over the summer acting on the SRA report that it had created its own dilemma: investigating a body for its (in)actions while at the same time being asked by that body for extra money to cover the consequences of those actions.

So now we have the farcical situation of the LSB needing more time to judge the SRA’s funding application because it took so much time judging the SRA.

All of this matters, for various reasons. Solicitors have already paid for this through the reputation of the profession being torn to shreds. Now they are potentially meeting the cost too.

The SRA managers who oversaw the Axiom Ince response are all still in place. Meanwhile, the SRA has carried out 10 interventions in the past month. If the LSB report has found systemic flaws in the way these matters are conducted, those flaws will still be in evidence.

And the irony of so much of this being conducted being closed doors will not be lost on the profession. We are not to be shown the report or even know why its publication is delayed (the election excuse looks more flimsy with every passing day). The LSB and SRA have spent years telling the profession it has to be more transparent. Is it too much to ask that the regulators themselves practise what they incessantly preach?

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