Richard James Morris; Candey Limited

Findings — machine-extracted (anthropic-batch:claude-opus-4-8); verify against the decision

Richard Morris, a solicitor and partner at Candey Limited, admitted all allegations relating to the Firm's handling of approximately £24m in settlement monies received in June 2015. The Tribunal found that Enhanced Due Diligence was not required and dismissed the money laundering allegations (1.1, 1.2 against Morris and 3.1-3.3 against the Firm) as not proved. The Tribunal found allegation 1.3 proved against Morris—that he used the client account as a banking facility by accepting client instructions to make payments to third parties rather than returning the funds to the client. Morris was fined £6,000. The Firm denied all allegations and none were proved against it. No express finding of dishonesty was made.

Duties found breached:

• No improper use of client money
• Non-discriminatory acceptance and cab-rank

Mitigating factors:

• Breach was inadvertent and unintentional
• Morris self-reported the potential breach to the SRA
• Payments were made openly and properly recorded on the client file with no attempt to conceal
• Misunderstanding of the rule rather than deliberate conduct
• Morris took steps to improve his knowledge of client account matters