Edgecliff lawyer suspended after alleged $5.9m trust fund misappropriation
An Edgecliff solicitor with more than 30 years of experience has been suspended from practising after a partner at his law firm raised suspicions over his ‘expensive new house in Bondi’.
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Police are investigating an eastern suburbs lawyer who was suspended from practising after misappropriating $5.9 million worth of trust funds.
Edgecliff solicitor Mark Leo O’Brien faced the disciplinary action from the Law Society of NSW this month after his partner at Harrington Maguire and O’Brien raised suspicions over his purchase of “an expensive new house” in Bondi.
A police spokesman also confirmed that it had “a current and ongoing criminal investigation involving a solicitor and the alleged misappropriation of a trust fund”.
In an urgent application to the Supreme Court on April 4, the Law Society sought to freeze the assets of the solicitor of more than 30 years and his wife over what it submitted was an estimated “$5.9 million” worth of misappropriated funds.
“The matter came to light, as these things often do, in a most unlikely way when facts incidentally came to the attention of the solicitor’s law partner who … was set to wondering about how his law partner had been able to afford an expensive new house at Bondi,” Justice Stephen Campbell said in an April 4 judgment.
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“When spoken to by his partner, the solicitor at first obfuscated and maintained that obfuscation for a period of time until it must have become obvious to him that he could no longer continue to deny his law partner’s suspicion.”
The property in Bondi has since been put on the market and the certificate of title has been deposited to the Law Society.
The court heard the Law Society was seeking the orders due to further misappropriations coming to light since O’Brien’s first admission in February.
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