John Knight & Second Respondent & Third Respondent

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

John Knight (First Respondent), a solicitor at Wosskow Brown, admitted causing the firm's client account to be used as a banking facility on the BHSLL care home scheme and CL project, involving the firm in a scheme bearing hallmarks of a dubious investment, creating misleading backdated documents ahead of an SRA FIO visit, relying on those documents in a response to an EWW letter, and amending/producing documents with incorrect dates to circumvent Companies House charge registration deadlines. The Tribunal found all allegations proved beyond reasonable doubt and made an express finding of dishonesty (Ivey test) regarding the misleading documents and falsified charge dates. Finding the misconduct at the highest level with no exceptional circumstances, the Tribunal struck him off the Roll and ordered him to pay costs of £19,662.16. The Second Respondent was fined £25,000 (inadequate supervision; barred from COLP/COFA roles) and the Third Respondent £35,000 (banking facility misuse; barred from holding client money/being a client account signatory), each paying £39,324.32 costs jointly and severally.

Duties found breached:

• Honesty
• Integrity
• No taking unfair advantage
• Uphold public trust in the profession
• Non-discriminatory acceptance and cab-rank
• No improper use of client money
• Cooperate openly with regulators

Aggravating factors:

• Conduct deliberate, calculated and repeated over a period of time
• Forging documents done more than once - to mislead SRA investigation and Companies House
• Very significant breach of trust
• Ought to have known he was in material breach of obligations

Mitigating factors:

• Previously unblemished career
• Made admissions (albeit once caught)
• Relatively junior at time of banking facility matters and inadequately supervised
• No personal financial gain in the banking facility matters