Petros Petrou & Stylianos Petrou

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

In an Agreed Outcome, the SDT found two brother solicitors of Petrou Law Partnership culpable for serious misconduct. The First Respondent, Petros Petrou, admitted overcharging two estates, improper borrowing of £100,000 from estate funds, improper transfers from client account, failures to disclose charges, and causing a client account shortage of up to £489,649.57, with lack of integrity, manifest incompetence and recklessness. He was struck off the Roll and undertook never to seek readmission. The Second Respondent, Stylianos Petrou, COLP, admitted only the cash-shortage allegation (lack of integrity and manifest incompetence) arising from his culpable failure to supervise the accounts; he was suspended for 12 months followed by an indefinite restriction order. Dishonesty was expressly withdrawn against both and never found. Each was ordered to pay £20,000 costs (£40,000 total).

Duties found breached:

• Cooperate openly with regulators
• Handle inadvertently received material
• Integrity
• No conflict between current clients
• No improper benefit, loan or bequest
• No improper use of client money
• Non-discriminatory acceptance and cab-rank
• Prosecutorial duty of disclosure

Aggravating factors:

• First Respondent admitted recklessness across all allegations
• Misconduct repeated and continued over a significant period
• Abuse of position of trust as solicitor-executor and breach of fiduciary duties
• Improper borrowing was planned
• Second Respondent had a previous Tribunal finding (fined £50,000 on 26 September 2019)
• Client money paid into an overdrawn office account
• Second Respondent benefitted financially from the excessive billing as co-owner

Mitigating factors:

• Minimum client account shortage was eventually replaced
• Cooperation with the SRA investigation
• Full and frank admissions demonstrating insight
• First Respondent had a previously unblemished career
• Remorse expressed
• Second Respondent incurred substantial personal debt (~£250,000) to remedy the shortfall
• Second Respondent was genuinely (though culpably) unaware of the First Respondent's underlying misconduct

⚠ figures not found verbatim in the source were dropped: ["review_dishonesty_finding_cue_present"]