A former employee at the scandal-hit collapsed firm Axiom Ince has been barred from the profession for failing to tell the Solicitors Regulation Authority that bank statements were being changed.
The regulator said Rupesh Karawadra failed to report this suspicious activity in August 2023 when the firm was on the verge of collapse and being shut down.
Karawadra agreed to forward by email bank statements from one party to another and later returned them in circumstances that were suspicious. None of this activity was shared with the SRA, despite the bank statements having been tampered with on their return.
The SRA said Karawadra, a non-solicitor whose exact role at Axiom Ince was not specified in the decision notice, was ‘partly involved in the systematic falsification of banking documents’.
The decision to issue him with a section 43 notice, preventing him from working for any regulated law firm, was made in April but published only this week. Karawadra, from Dunstable in Bedfordshire, was also ordered to pay £600 costs.
His misconduct occurred between 1 and 4 August, which would prove to be a critical time in the Axiom affair and a period when potentially large sums of money went missing.
Read more:
Axiom Ince independent review: What the SRA knew - and what it failed to do | Law Gazette
In depth: Axiom Ince report makes grim reading for defiant SRA | Law Gazette
According to this year’s Legal Services Board report into the SRA’s handling of Axiom, the SRA discovered the misappropriation of funds from Axiom’s client account in July 2023.
Three directors, including owner Pragnesh Modhwadia, were suspended on 11 August and the firm was a whole was shut down in October 2023. This meant that the firm’s accounts could still be accessed for more than two months after the misappropriation of funds was discovered.
The LSB report said the partial intervention into the practices of three individuals was an ‘unusual step’ considering that the shortfall in the client account was already known to be significant. The SRA’s response was deemed ‘inadequate’ because it did not communicate effectively with the remaining Axiom directors: by the time of the intervention in October 2023, the directors had continued to make payments out of the client account and the funds remaining had reduced by almost £36m.
