A Richmond real estate lawyer who has been suspended for one year for her mishandling of trust accounts from which $7.5 million disappeared in 2016, faces numerous other disciplinary allegations, according to the sa国际传媒 Law Society.
In eight separate actions, six of those filed in 2020 and 2021, Hong Guo, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Richmond in 2018, faces allegations related to conflict of interest in the purchase of a sawmill, a real estate development project, and a purchase of shares in a company. She also faces allegations of misconduct for misappropriation or improperly handling client payments and mishandling trust funds.
The allegations include that Guo improperly handled money for a company for which she was removed as a signing authority and for violating a 2019 order against practicing law when she was temporarily suspended from doing so.
The allegations in most of the cases have not been heard by a law society tribunal (the body that adjudicates disciplinary matters) and have not been proven.
The law society had sought disbarment of Guo for the case in which she received a one-year suspension, but it is not known at this juncture what penalties, if any, she would face in the other cases. If allegations are proven, penalties are based on the facts of each case and rulings in similar cases.
In one of the eight cases, a hearing has been held, and Guo has been found to have mishandled trust funds, where she deposited cash advances for legal services in relation to a share purchase and transfer, a marriage agreement and several wills into her general account and not a trust account.
At the time, Guo was also restricted from handling any trust funds on an order from the sa国际传媒 Law Society.
In that case, Guo had argued that advance payment for a “fixed-fee” legal service becomes the lawyer’s property and therefore did not constitute trust money and didn’t need to be deposited in a trust account.
The tribunal disagreed.
A tribunal hearing to determine a penalty in that case was heard this summer but has yet to be delivered.
The timing of hearings in the other cases is not yet known, said sa国际传媒 Law Society spokesman Jason Kuzminski.
“I appreciate that the decision by the panel has recognized that I covered the trust shortage and no clients suffered any loss,” Guo said in a written statement Tuesday.
In her recent one-year suspension that starts Dec. 1, a tribunal found that Guo had 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 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.
In the recent suspension decision, the law society had sought a disciplinary penalty of disbarment, but the tribunal, in ordering the one-year suspension, considered the misconduct to have been motivated by an intention to ensure pending transactions completed in time, and that all clients were eventually made financially whole by Guo and an employee insurance policy. The panel also noted that Guo currently has no access to a trust account and is practising under the supervision of another lawyer.
In the past, Guo has said that she was a victim. She blamed her former employees for the trust account situation, saying she had to trust and delegate work to staff, given the size of her practice.
Civil filings in sa国际传媒 Supreme Court had showed that about 100 clients were affected by the disappearance of $7.5 million from the trust accounts of Guo’s law firm, which she has said completed about $700 million a year in real-estate transactions.
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