Solicitor who repaid £147,500 after resigning is struck off

A veteran private wealth solicitor has agreed to be struck off after admitting dishonestly backdating a declaration of trust.

Glenn Hurstfield also admitted authorising loans from a client of which he was a trustee to a charity and arranging a £112,000 transfer into his personal bank account for a purported loan repayment. He was struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal after making an agreed outcome with the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

Hurstfield, a solicitor for 40 years, had been the owner of Mayfair firm Berkeley Law Limited before it was acquired in 2014 by national firm Irwin Mitchell.

He became an employee of a rebranded private wealth entity in 2017 but was suspended a year later following an investigation by Irwin Mitchell into internal audits. The firm instructed City firm Herbert Smith Freehills to conduct the probe.

In September 2018, Hurstfield resigned. Enclosed with his letter of resignation was a cheque for £147,500 to reinstate any funds (together with interest) that might be interpretated as improper withdrawals of client money.

On the declaration of trust, Hurstfield had arranged for an amended document to be backdated to the date of the original, only with the word ‘irrevocably’ changed to ‘revocably’. This returned the legal and beneficial ownership of a property to Hurstfield’s clients, who had expressed concerns that their son was intending to leave an interest in the property to someone else in his will.

In mitigation, not endorsed by the SRA, the solicitor said his client’s wife had approached him with concerns about her son, a recovering drug addict, having full control of the property. Hurstfield said the son was still the beneficiary of his parents’ will so he would not suffer any real detriment, and he ‘truly believed’ he was acting in the best interests of all involved.

The tribunal heard that Hurstfield was both a co-trustee of a trust and director of a charity. In 2016, two payments of £40,000 each, referred to as ‘donations’ in correspondence, were made from the trust to the charity, with no evidence of approval from co-trustees. The previous year, a payment of £112,000 was transferred from a client account with links to the charity into Hurstfield’s personal account, with the reference ‘loan repayment’. At the time, his bank account was overdrawn by around £113,700. The Irwin Mitchell investigation found what appeared to be informal and undocumented loans across a number of years involving the charity and Hurstfield.

Hurstfield said that the loans from the trust to the charity were at beneficial rates. Personal loans to the charity were ‘informal, unsecured and interest free’, hence the lack of formal documentation. Once it was clear the charity would survive and grow, it was agreed that personal loans could be repaid.

The tribunal found it was ‘proportionate and in the public interest’ that Hurstfield be struck off, concluding that his conduct ‘fell far below the standards of integrity, probity and trustworthiness expected of a solicitor’.

Hurstfield agreed to pay £52,282 costs.