A senior Aberdeen lawyer broke into his colleague’s desk and discovered the co-worker had embezzled “substantially more” from an elderly client than first suspected – a jury has heard.
Duncan Love, a partner at James and George Collie Solicitors in Aberdeen, said he and a colleague “discovered a smoking gun” after cracking the lock of solicitor John Sinclair’s desk with a hammer and screwdriver.
Mr Love told jurors at Aberdeen Sheriff Court that he was horrified to find bank statements suggesting Sinclair had embezzled £120,000.
The accused had been dismissed from the firm only days before when he was found to control a number of bank accounts belonging to a vulnerable 90-year-old woman.
He had not declared it to colleagues, the court was told.
“The sums we found were far higher than he had led us to believe,” Mr Love said.
“He told us £50,000 had been taken, but substantially more had been taken by him. I was appalled at the magnitude – it was quite a shock.”
John Sinclair owed more than £66,000 in unpaid taxes
Sinclair, a former partner at James and George Collie, is on trial over allegations he embezzled a large sum of money from bank accounts belonging to client Dr Doreen Milne.
The 69-year-old lawyer had been granted power of attorney over the wealthy retired doctor’s finances following her dementia diagnosis in 2014.
Sinclair, of Murtle Den Road in Aberdeen, denies all the charges against him.
A number of demand letters from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) were also found.
They showed Sinclair owed more than £66,000 in unpaid taxes.
Mr Love told fiscal depute Lynne MacVicar that while paperwork showed Sinclair paid his outstanding debts with the alleged stolen money, he hadn’t used it “exclusively” for that purpose.
James and George Collie colleagues ‘discovered a smoking gun’
Asked how he felt upon finding the cache of documents, Mr Love replied: “We discovered a smoking gun.
“We thought we had found damning evidence of at least £120,000 taken from Dr Milne for his own use.
“And we thought we could see some of the uses he’d made of the money. It was all found in that locked drawer.”
Asked what he and his colleague did next, Mr Love told the fiscal depute that they padlocked the office “because we considered it might be a crime scene”.
Alleged victim was OAP with dementia
It was also claimed by Mr Love that Sinclair admitted during a private meeting that he’d had “40 years in law” and had “made this one mistake”.
He further claimed that Sinclair had led him to believe that Dr Milne was a “spritely switched-on lady” who “was in control of her own finances”.
Mr Love said he later discovered that Dr Milne was a vulnerable 90-year-old dementia patient who lived in a care home.
Sinclair is also accused of repeatedly deleting computer entries in an attempt to avoid detection.
It’s claimed that Sinclair approached a work colleague and asked him how to permanently delete an “event log” from his firm’s computer system.
Sinclair was the only partner at the firm who was able to delete client files due to a “quirk” he’d arranged when the computer system was set up, Mr Love claimed.
The trial, before Sheriff Morag McLaughlin, continues.
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