Solicitor jailed for £250k fraud ~ Debt Managements and Consolidation

Carlisle based property solicitor Pauline Butler has been jailed for two years after being convicted of carrying out a £250,000 fraud.

Butler, 53, committed the offences, which included stealing a £49,000 inheritance belonging to Elizabeth Harkness - a woman with learning difficulties, as a last ditch attempt to stop her Lowther Street practice from being closed down. Over a period of nearly four and a half years, Butler moved money from her clients’ accounts to her own business account. The presiding judge, Paul Batty QC, told Butler: “This type of case causes considerable damage to the public confidence in the legal system.”Between 1993 and 2008, Butler ran her law firm which specialised in property, wills and family law. Despite investing more than £90,000 into the business during 2007, by 2008 Butler’s law firm was unable to meet its liabilities, the News and Star reports. As a result, she began to secretly transfer money from clients’ accounts, creating fictitious bills to explain the transfer to her business account. If a client wanted to close an account, she shifted money from another client’s account to cover the shortfall. Prosecutor Dick Binstead said: “This was really a game of financial musical chairs – and the flaw in the system, of course, was that when the music stopped, there would be a day of reckoning.” Butler, who admitted a single count of fraud and a charge of false accounting, said that as a result of her failing business, she suffered two ‘mental breakdowns’.After client complaints, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) began an investigation in 2008 which revealed that Butler had stolen around £250,000 from clients.The relatives of deceased Elsie O’Neill lost around £170,000 worth of inheritance after Butler charged them for 43 bills, only three of which were genuine. Butler also illegally transferred £21,000 from Rose Blaylock’s account, who had asked Butler to help her son after a divorce and house sale. QC for Butler, Paul Greaney, told the court: “She has made no attempt at all to shift responsibility or to suggest that any other was to blame for what occurred. She was at pains to make plain that the responsibility for these crimes was hers and hers alone.“Her conduct was not motivated, as is accepted, by greed. As your honour will know, in many such cases defendants – solicitors and other professional advisors who have abused their trust – have bought expensive homes with the proceeds, and often expensive motor cars and lived extravagant lifestyles. Pauline Butler lived in a modest home.“She lived a modest lifestyle and that is because her crimes were driven not by greed but rather, albeit wrongly, by a desire to keep her business running and to keep her employees, to whom she felt considerable loyalty, in work.”Butler was struck off as a solicitor in July 2009. Her clients were reimbursed by the Solicitors’ Compensation Fund, who paid out £600,000 in compensation to her clients, although the total value of claims for money lost was around £900,000. It is now believed that all clients have been fully reimbursed.
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