A CROOKED Kilmacolm lawyer embezzled more than £1m from a bank while his  business partner grossly overcharged clients by nearly 600 per cent for routine work.

David Lyons and Duncan Drummond have now been struck off of the roll of solicitors after being found guilty by a disciplinary tribunal of professional misconduct stretching back 10 years.

Lyons, 64, secured a loan of £1.04 million from the Bank of Ireland in April 2005 in order to re-finance credit facilities provided by another lender and to pay for ‘additional investment’ - but he kept huge chunks of the money for himself.

He failed to respond to repeated correspondence seeking answers and assurances about the money before the Law Society of Scotland reported both he and Drummond, 60, over a catalogue of irregularities uncovered at their Lyons Laing legal practice in Greenock’s George Square.

A number of those malpractice abnormalities related to massively inflated fees charged by the duo’s firm for carrying out executry work on behalf of trusting clients.

In one case, Drummond took in £15,700 from issuing a payment demand invoice to a customer for a job which was later calculated by an independent auditor at Greenock Sheriff Court to be worth just £2,350. 

The excessive and fraudulent fee represented an astonishing mark up of 568 per cent. 

On another occasion Drummond took remuneration from another client which exceeded by £90,000 the value of the work which he had actually done.

The Scottish Solicitors Discipline Tribunal (SDDT) found that Lyons - who lives in an expensive home in Kilmacolm’s leafy Pacemuir Road - was ‘guilty of a serious catalogue of offending’.

Drummond, of Pollokshields, Glasgow, was said by the tribunal to have committed ‘reprehensible departures’ from the standard of conduct expected from someone in the legal profession.

Out of the money embezzled from the Bank of Ireland, Lyons paid more than £580,000 into the account of a firm known only as ‘Company 1’, more than £127,000 to himself, and nearly 146,000 to Lyons Laing itself. 
Other money from the loan went on servicing debt and buying property. 

Among a list of Lyons Laing’s inflated client legal fees, highlighted by the SDDT, not one fell below an overcharge rate of 72 per cent, and aside from the 568 per cent fleecing of one client, others received bills which swelled 256 per cent, 188 per cent, 121 per cent and 86 per cent above the going rate.

The Telegraph revealed in July 2009 that concerns about the way Lyons Laing was being operated had been raised by the Law Society.

Lyons and Drummond were suspended in the face of a full scale probe into their activities by a judicial factor.

The pair had already been fined £10,000 each by the SDDT for breaching society accounts rules but this led on to the wider investigation. 

A Law Society spokeswoman said at the time that the society had ‘previously recognised problems’ at Lyons Laing, adding: “Further concerns were identified during an inspection at the firm by the society’s financial compliance team.” 

The SDDT professional misconduct hearing into the misdeeds carried out by Lyons and Drummond took place in October with the full ruling now available.

Drummond claimed that Lyons Laing firm had run into financial difficulties. Lyons did not attempt to defend himself to the SDDT.

Tribunal vice chairman Nicholas Whyte says in his report: “Without doubt the first respondent (Lyons) was guilty of a serious catalogue of offending.

“He had misappropriated funds from executry accounts. He had embezzled over a million pounds from the Bank of Ireland. He had breached accounts rules and had failed to respond to correspondence and statutory notices from the Law Society. Each of these matters in their own right was extremely serious misconduct.

“Each in their own right satisfied the test of professional misconduct... Accordingly, the tribunal had no hesitation in convicting the first respondent of professional misconduct.”