A solicitor has been suspended from practice for a year for failing to prevent his firm’s client account being used as a banking facility by a Saudi prince who was trying to buy three supercars.
Raja Shazad Khan, owner of Lancashire firm Justice Solicitors, also known as Tangent Law, admitted causing, allowing or failing to prevent the firm providing a banking facility to a client who was trying to buy two Ferraris and a Bugatti.
Khan, admitted in 2008, also admitted failing to supervise unqualified consultant Colin Goldring, who paid €8.3m (£7.2m) from the firm’s client account to third parties without the consent of the firm’s client, described as ‘a member of a prominent, foreign royal family’.
The client is not named in the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal’s ruling but is believed to be Prince Badr Bin Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz, Saudi Arabia’s minister of culture, who filed a High Court claim against Justice Solicitors in March 2021, according to court records.
Prince Badr paid €9.4m (£8.1m) into Justice Solicitors’ client account but ‘never received the motor cars or had most of his funds returned’, the tribunal heard. The prince’s solicitors also said that the firm made several payments to intermediaries without his consent.
Justice Solicitors transferred €1.34m (£1.2m) to a bank account in Tunisia and it was ‘unclear what anti-money laundering checks the firm had undertaken in respect of any of these transactions’, the SDT was told.
Khan, 51, was suspended for 12 months, indefinitely banned from managing or owning a law firm or practising on his own account and ordered to pay the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s costs in the sum of £20,000.
Goldring, 38, has also been banned from working for a law firm without the permission of the SRA and ordered to pay costs of £13,000.
