Disqualified by SRA
A legal executive has been barred from working in the legal profession after misappropriating over £200,000 from a deceased client’s estate and transferring the funds into a company he owned.
Christopher Takamitsu Foster, formerly employed as a private client executive at Robert Barber & Sons in West Bridgford, Nottingham, was disqualified by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) earlier this month.
Foster was found to have acted dishonestly on multiple occasions between 2021 and 2023, breaching the SRA’s Principles on honesty and integrity. His misconduct first came to light in June 2023 when a partner at the firm, assisting with Foster’s workload, noticed irregularities in payments from a client trust.
A review of his files revealed a catalogue of serious issues — including that Foster had moved £219,094.26 from an estate into a private company he had incorporated just months earlier .He was the sole director and shareholder of the business, and, according to the published decision, he fabricated a contact note to falsely suggest that the transfer had been authorised by the estate’s beneficiary.
Further investigation uncovered additional improper payments from another estate, routed to unrelated individuals in breach of the deceased’s will, and a separate incident in which Foster arranged for estate funds to be paid directly to himself rather than into the firm’s client account.
He also failed to progress a client matter over an 18-month period and produced fraudulent documents to cover up the lack of progress, misleading both supervisors and the client, the SRA found.
Foster was suspended by the firm on 21 June 2023, and the matter was reported to the police and the firm’s insurers. He was arrested on 31 July and later released on bail.
Foster was made subject to a section 99 disqualification order under the Legal Services Act 2007, meaning he is banned from working in any SRA-regulated law firm as a manager, employee, head of legal practice, or head of finance and administration.
He has also been ordered to pay £1,350 in costs.