Opinion ID: 2447456
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Respondent's Additional Misuse of the Funds in Her Attorney Trust Account

Text: Following entry of the judgment against Respondent in Ba's law suit, Bar Counsel commenced a general investigation into Respondent's management of the funds in her attorney trust account. As part of this investigation, Bar Counsel served Respondent with a subpoena on 25 January 2008 requesting that she provide certain financial data and records regarding her trust account and other professional accounts relevant to the period of 2 January 2002 through 30 June 2006. In response, Respondent produced only copies of deposit slips and customer receipts from 21 March 2003 through 7 June 2006, monthly bank statements from 1 August 2003 through 31 May 2006, and disbursed checks from 25 April 2003 through 22 May 2006 related to the trust account. Respondent never produced any requested billing statements, ledger cards, or accounting of funds that she received, maintained, and disbursed from her trust account during this period. [4] Although Respondent claimed that she knew whose money was in her attorney trust account, she provided Bar Counsel with no accounting records upon which its investigation could proceed. Bar Counsel was forced to perform its own analysis of Respondent's account, using such records as could be found. This analysis revealed numerous other aspects of Respondent's financial malfeasance and nonfeasance regarding other clients and persons. In what might seem to be the most egregious of the instances of mismanagement of the funds in the trust account, Respondent deposited monies into the account ostensibly earmarked for the election campaign of Christopher Ngige, Respondent's brother and a gubernatorial candidate in Nigeria. According to the testimony of Anthony Isama, one of Respondent's witnesses and a friend of Ngige, Eke Onuma (who, as noted supra, Respondent claimed was the client from whom she had borrowed funds in the Njosa foreclosure scheme) is in fact a Nigerian businessman who acted as an intermediary between Respondent and the Ngige election campaign. Isama stated that Onuma agreed to pay the Ngige campaign an amount of naira [5] corresponding to funds collected and held for the campaign in Respondent's attorney trust account. Like most of Respondent's other explanations regarding the use of the funds in her trust account, her explanation of the funding of the Ngige campaign through her escrow account was supported by very little documentation. Respondent claimed to have received several deposits, totaling $110,493, in her attorney trust account slated to be transferred to the Ngige campaign, but she failed to provide an accounting reflecting these deposits. In addition, there was no documentation offered to corroborate the fact that Onuma's naira payments equaling the funds collected and held in Respondent's account for Ngige in fact were paid to the campaign. [6] Respondent testified that Onuma instructed her to disburse the ostensible campaign funds in her account for the benefit of his children, who attend school in the United States. Again, no records were produced by Respondent showing the amount of these funds held in her attorney trust account or how she disbursed those funds. Respondent and her witness, Isama, even disagreed as to who managed the campaign funds; each claimed that he or she alone was responsible for collecting the funds and communicating the totals to Onuma and the Ngige campaign. Respondent's explanations of amounts credited to her trust account, ostensibly in connection with the Ngige campaign, were similarly unsupported. Respondent claimed that $349,975 wired into her attorney trust account on 19 August 2005 came from [unspecified] personal injury cases and from attorneys' fees and reimbursed expenses in the Dr. Ngige election tribunal case[s] in Nigeria. Respondent, however, did not have any corroborative testimonial or documentary evidence to support these oral assertions. The record shows that, on 29 August 2005, she deposited a $120,000 personal check for which Judge Dugan found she offered again no logical or coherent accounting. [7] Respondent also transferred $50,000 into her attorney trust account in September 2005, funds which she claimed belonged to Ngige. In addition, Respondent's refusal even to identify forthrightly Christopher Ngige as her brother was evasive, at best. Respondent stated disingenuously that Ngige merely was somebody's name. Even though Ngige was not a client of Respondent's, she asserted an attorney-client privilege and refused to explain her relationship to him. When Isama testified that Ngige is Respondent's brother, Judge Dugan asked Respondent why she had engaged in such subterfuge. Respondent stood mute. The Ngige campaign funds actually were not the crowning underachievement of Respondent's misuse of the funds in her trust account. Judge Dugan found further that Respondent repeatedly advanced funds for clients prior to depositing funds into her attorney trust account to cover these disbursements. From 2002 to 2006, Respondent disbursed from the account a total of $134,312.85 prior to making deposits necessary to fund those disbursements. When asked by Bar Counsel to explain several specific instances of this practice, Respondent replied to each inquiry that each premature disbursement was due to an administrative glitch. Settlement sheets for a number of clients showed also that actual disbursements exceeded the total amount of payment received on behalf of those clients. Still other settlement sheets did not depict accurately the disbursements made from the account. For example, client Georgina Kun-Shermand's settlement sheet states that Kun-Shermand's net settlement was $729 when the actual disbursement was $1,273, and that $1,172 was disbursed to Greater Washington Orthopaedic when the actual disbursement was $2,077. From 1 January 2002 through 24 April 2006, Respondent also maintained personal funds in her attorney trust account. During this period, she issued checks from the account for personal expenses ranging in amounts from $91.25 to $24,397, to (among other recipients) American Express, Bank of America, the Knights of Columbus, Adeline/MaryKay, and her daughter Linda Nwadike, and had an automatic $1,559.84 monthly mortgage payment debited from her account. [8] Isama testified that three suspect debits on Respondent's trust account paid to American Express, totaling $7,820, and one check issued from the account to MBNA, for $35,600, were payments for credit card purchases Respondent made for Ngige's wife. A further $50,000 cash withdrawal Respondent made from her account on 4 December 2002 was never explained.