A former solicitor who defrauded clients of almost £2 million was today jailed for four years and eight months.
Christopher Michael Bilmes, 45, who was the sole partner and founder of Bilmes Law LLP, practising in conveyancing and family law, spoke only to confirm his name at the sentencing before Recorder David Brock at Hove Trial Centre. ‘Conveyancing work provided fertile ground for misappropriation of funds from client accounts,’ the recorder said.
Bilmes pleaded guilty to seven charges of fraud. Between November 2014 and October 2017 he dishonestly appropriated £1,767,322 from the client account of his firm. Of the seven charges, one was deemed the ‘overarching’ charge.
As of 17 January 2023, the Solicitors Regulation Authority Compensation Fund had received claims from ‘52 clients with a total value of £3.9m’. The regulator has ‘paid grants on 30 of those, grants that total £2.65m’.
At a previous hearing, Brock said: ‘Despite the criminal loss of £1.7m, the Law Society through inference were exposed to liability of nearly £4m. It is ultimately the loss to the authority.’
The now struck-off solicitor ran Bilmes LLP from offices in Fleet Street, London, before he moved to a converted barn in a ‘relatively isolated area’ in Groombridge, Kent, in 2016 without informing clients. The firm retained a DX box in London which ‘was never checked’, the court was told. When it eventually was checked, a decree absolute was found inside as well as a county court order.
An unpaid mortgage following a house sale led two of the firm’s employees to report Bilmes to the SRA when only around £150,000 of the £380,000 needed to pay the bank was in the client account – despite the house sale completing weeks earlier.
The fraud came to light in October 2017 when the firm stopped trading and the SRA intervened.
Bilmes was also the director of a limited company called Bilmes Organisation Limited, also known as BORG. All employees of the firm received remuneration through BORG.
The SRA investigated Bilmes in 2015, finding breaches of accounts rules stating that client money must be separated from the firm’s money. A shortage of just over £67,000 was found and the SRA gave Bilmes a written rebuke.
Daniel O’Donoghue, prosecuting, told the court the employees who raised concerns with the SRA found the firm was run in a ‘chaotic manner’ and that Bilmes ‘completed no legal work and seemed more concerned with [his] clothing brand Swallows and Daggers’.
He added: ‘The defendant was in complete and total control of the firm’s finances. He was the compliance officer. Only the defendant had access to the bank account.’ Concerns were raised by an employee and when she asked Bilmes for ‘statements, invoices, files or historical accounts…he said: “it is all Greek to me”’.
Eventually the employee was granted access to the account on a read-only basis. She discovered funds would be transferred from the client account into the firm’s office account to the BORG account and all salaries paid from the BORG account.
O’Donoghue added: ‘Within the first few postings it was clear the accounts of almost all the 350 to 400 clients on the books were overdrawn…it meant the money had been spent. It was a fixed fee business…there was no reason for the clients to be overdrawn.
‘He would on most days transfer between £5,000 to £10,000 from the client account to the office account to the BORG account. It covered the defendant’s high personal expenditure and was used to fund his other businesses.’
The court was told transfers were made ‘to pay rent in a warehouse…used to hold stock for Swallow and Dagger, trade fairs abroad and [he] would use the BORG account to pay for flights and accommodation’.
One of the people affected by Bilmes’ fraud was advised by him to apply for a loan of £45,000 from the litigation finance provider Novitas to help fund her case over a disputed property. Reading from Hanneke Koekkoek’s witness statement, O’Donoghue said: ‘I have endured nearly a decade of utter despair and grief and anxiety and for what? The answer is your greed. Such was the extent of your greed that you withheld vital information, misguided my case all to the detriment of our case and the benefit of yourself. The consequences of your greed and dishonesty will stay with us for the rest of our lives.
‘I took it for granted I could put my trust in you. You betrayed that trust in ways I could not imagine. You do not have the right to ever refer to yourself as a solicitor because you never really were one. You are a thief.’
Sean Hammond, defending, told the court at the previous hearing: ‘By the time the firm closed down, in addition to £1.7m owed to the client account, there had been no payment to HMRC in relation to VAT, PI, and rent on the premises had not been paid. Significant loans had been taken out by the company most of which were guaranteed personally by Mr Bilmes. [There were] debts in the region of £3.5m which includes £1.7m in this case. He was seeking to defer the inevitable and the inevitable came crashing down.’
Sentencing Bilmes, Brock said: ‘In my opinion the offending is so serious an immediate term of imprisonment is appropriate.’
He added: ‘The SRA compensation scheme paid out 30 successful claims but only four victims are named in charges I am dealing with today. The figure in this case is £1,767,322 for the purpose of this sentencing.’
Bilmes was sentenced to 56 months’ imprisonment in relation to charge five – the overarching charge – and to a year’s imprisonment for each of the other six charges to run concurrently.
A confiscation hearing will be held later this year.
