Dalida Rajeshree Jhugroo

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

The Respondent, a solicitor and former partner at Hartington Law, acted for a client (Ms L) on a cash property purchase completed in September 2010. She received all completion funds including £27,600 for SDLT and £550 for the Land Registry fee, but failed to submit the SDLT return, pay HMRC, pay the registration fee, or register the client's title. As a result, the client remained unregistered as legal owner for years and lost a later sale and onward purchase in 2014. The fate of the £28,150 client money was unknown. The Tribunal found the Respondent's failure was reckless to a level amounting to a lack of integrity, but expressly accepted her conduct was not deliberate and was an oversight - no finding of dishonesty was made. All allegations (1.1, 1.2, 1.3) were proved. Given the seriousness, harm to the client, prior disciplinary record and limited insight, the Tribunal struck her off the Roll and ordered costs of £4,816.85. Allegation 1.4 was withdrawn and allegation 1.2 was amended. The hearing proceeded in her absence.

Duties found breached:

• Integrity
• No baseless or threatened misconduct report
• No conflict between current clients
• No improper use of client money
• Uphold public trust in the profession

Aggravating factors:

• Knew or should have realised she was in material breach of obligations to protect the public and profession's reputation
• Previous disciplinary findings against her (three-year suspension and £13,000 costs in 2012 for serious SAR breaches)
• Limited insight into misconduct and harm caused
• Failure to engage properly with proceedings or explain what happened to the £28,150

Mitigating factors:

• Misconduct was an omission rather than commission, not deliberate
• Conduct occurred during the chaotic closure of her firm after departure of her business partner
• Had not had the opportunity to learn from previous misconduct as events occurred around the same time
• Made some admissions of fact and co-operated to a limited extent