COURT OF APPEAL

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 263, 4 October 1933, Page 5

COURT OF APPEAL

A REQUEST REFUSED. Per Press Association. WELLINGTON, Oct. 3. Application was made by the Canterbury District Law Society to the Court of Appeal this afternoon to make absolute a rule nisi to strike off the rolls of barristers and solicitors of the Dominion William John Stacey and Cecil Speucer Penlington, of the firm of Stacey and Penlington, barristers and solicitors, Christchurch. Mr H. J. Thompson appeared for the Law Society and Mr F. B. Sergeant and Mr W. R. Lascelles, both of Christchurch, for Stacey and Penlington. The grounds of the application to strike off the names were that the solicitors made, or permitted to be made, loans of trust moneys from the composite fund of their trust account and that they had not kept intact the moneys entrusted to them by their clients. After hearing Counsel, the Chief Justice (Sir Michael Myers) delivered the judgment of the Court as follows: “I cannot too strongly deprecate the book-keeping and other practices complained of bv the society and admitted by the solicitors whose conduct is in question. They deserve the gravest censure for the irregularities which they committed. W© are further impressed by the admitted fact that there was no personal dishonesty suggested against the solicitors and nothing except the gravest irregularity and improprieties. They do not seem to have made any improper profit, nor have they been .guilty of anything in the .nature of misappropriation or speculation. While visiting on them this reprimand, and while repeating that their conduct warrants very grave censure, we think that, in the the circumstances, we are justified in not striking them off the rolls, or suspending them, in view of the undertaking by counsel for the solicitors that they would for three years faithfully and promptly comply with all che proper requisitions of the Law Society and that they would submit their books to be audited by an auditor appointed by the Law Society. The rule should be discharged with costs to the society.” The Chief Justice added tha.t the Canterbury Law Society should certainly consider whether it should bring the matter of the auditor’s conduct prominently before the Society of Accountants.