Under-fire Richmond real estate and immigration lawyer Hong Guo has narrowly escaped being disbarred and has instead been banned from practising for a year.
The Law Society of BC broke the news of the year-long suspension late Thursday morning, after a disciplinary hearing in the summer.
The governing body had sought a disciplinary penalty of disbarment after Guo committed professional misconduct by failing to supervise her employees, failing to comply with trust accounting rules, and leaving a series of blank signed trust cheques with her bookkeeper, which facilitated the bookkeeper’s theft of $7.5 million of client trust funds.
The panel also found earlier this year that Guo misappropriated trust funds from some clients, in order to replace funds missing from other clients’ trust accounts that were needed to complete pending real estate transactions.
However, given that some of her misconduct was motivated by an intention to ensure pending transactions were completed in time and that all clients affected were repaid, the society’s disciplinary panel decided to suspend Guo, as opposed to disbarment.
The panel also noted that Guo currently has no access to a trust account and is practicing under the supervision of a lawyer.
The Law Society said her suspension will start Dec. 1. She has also been ordered to pay the Law Society its costs totalling $47,329.44, which she is allowed to pay in instalments of $1,000 per month.
Guo has never been far from controversy in the last few years, having run unsuccessfully for mayor in Richmond in 2018, all while the aforementioned misconduct allegations were unravelling.
In her defence, she claimed that her bookkeeper stole $7.5 million from her law firm’s trust accounts in 2016, before laundering the cash at a casino and fleeing to China.
Guo told the society’s disciplinary panel that her mistake “was placing trust in her employee who took advantage of her trust to commit a sophisticated scam” and her actions didn’t amount to professional misconduct.
She said her subsequent attempts to repay to her clients the “stolen” $7.5 million – which the society ruled as a breach of trust accounting rules – was an honest bid to minimize the overall impact of the missing trust funds on her clients.
The panel heard last year how Guo had deposited $2.6 million of her own money and $4 million from an insurance policy to repay the missing millions.
And she made the headlines again this past summer when the Richmond News reported how Guo lost a law suit over a disputed $740,000 renovation bill at her offices in Richmond.
She was been ordered to pay $311,000 plus interest and court costs to IRL Construction, after it was hired to carry out an extensive renovation project at her No. 3 Road office building.
