In a rare private prosecution before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, a solicitor is facing accusations of not revealing the true extent of a neighbour dispute when he assisted in a family member’s house sale.
Keith Charles Flavell, admitted in 1983, appeared before the SDR yesterday accused of professional misconduct. The case was brought by Andrew Fulton, who represented himself, the purchaser of the property.
Flavell, who said he was not acting professionally in the sale, denies all allegations against him.
Opening the prosecution yesterday, Fulton said: ‘This is really not a very complicated case. It is not in dispute that the respondent personally knew the history of neighbour disputes that affected his brother and sister-in-law’s property.’
He told the tribunal: ‘If a litigation solicitor knows of adverse documents…the solicitor must either insist on disclosure of documents or come off the record and cease acting. If a solicitor knows there are documents not being disclosed, he cannot continue to act in that matter for that client. This we say is professional conduct 101.’
The fact that Flavell acquired knowledge of the neighbour dispute in a personal rather than professional capacity ’is completely irrelevant’, Fulton said. ’He came to know about all these neighbour disputes because the vendor was his brother who he had been helping with all these disputes.’
The tribunal heard that, in the seller’s property information form, the full extent of the neighbour dispute was not listed. While a ‘hedge incident’ was cited, Fulton told the court that this was ‘grossly misleading’ - ‘it did not even begin to capture the full drama of the correspondence [from the neighbour]’.
Flavell, who was managing partner at Harrow-firm Harold Benjamin at the time, told the tribunal that the vendors ’were not advised that letters [from the neighbour] had to be disclosed’.
When it was put to him that his brother asked him specifically for advice, Flavell said: ‘No he did not.’ He added: ‘He asked me about what should be said on the form about the neighbour dispute. There was no detail, nothing about the driveway, nothing about hedge cutting. I was not involved in this conveyancing process. It was done by another solicitor.’
When asked by Fulton if he ‘did not think it was significant to tell a conveyancing solicitor’ about the neighbour disputes, Flavell said: ‘The duty was on Mr and Mrs Flavell.’
When asked to ‘put yourself in the shoes of a purchaser about to pay £1million for a house’, Flavell said that ‘he would like to know about the letters’.
The tribunal heard that Flavell had previously, before the property was put up for sale, written to the neighbour on behalf of his brother and sister-in-law.
Of the seller's property information form, Flavell said: ‘It was a handwritten form. I jotted down the words about the hedge because that hedge incident was probably talked about [in a telephone conversation]. I was being asked to advise and I put some words on the form, that is my case.’
Flavell told the tribunal: ‘Through the whole of the conveyancing process, I was not the partner you refer to, I was not the contacting solicitor. I had no involvement at all.’
Flavell is accused of professional misconduct, including making suggestions which he knew to be false and misleading on the seller’s property information form, refraining from making his conveyancing colleague aware of the history of complaints, disputes and associated correspondence with the neighbour and thereby allowing the purchasers to be misled.
The hearing continues.
