SDT: US conviction reliable
A solicitor convicted in the US of conspiracy to commit securities fraud has been struck off after a tribunal refused his attempt to explain why he signed a plea deal.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) said Matthew Conway Ledvina was trying to “obfuscate the circumstances of the conviction and to minimise the significance of the guilty plea he had entered voluntarily”.
A private client specialist, Mr Ledvina qualified as a solicitor in 2007 but practised abroad at all relevant times. He was also qualified in Switzerland, where he was a partner in the law firm Anaford, the US and Ireland.
In 2019, following a plea bargain, he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud before a court in Massachusetts, USA.
The SDT recorded that it was found he assisted his co-conspirators by creating nominee entities used to hold shares in a publicly traded company. These entities allowed the true owners of the shares to mask their identities and secretly sell large quantities of shares and artificially inflate the price in a scheme known as a ‘pump and dump’.
He was sentenced to 30 months’ probation and fined $50,000. Last year, he was further ordered, jointly and severally with others, to make restitution of nearly $2m to the victims of his offending. That was satisfied wholly by the proceeds of the fraud after his two co-accused forfeited around $4m of their profits to the US authorities.
In written submissions, Mr Ledvina argued that “public policy in the UK is not the same as public policy in the US regarding the negotiability of criminal sentences based on plea bargaining”.
He said the conviction was not the result of a fact-finding enquiry by the US courts; the only enquiry made by the judge was whether he “knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily” exercised his right to plead guilty upon arraignment.
“This was not the same as finding the facts of the underlying case proven and it would be wrong to treat a conviction in such circumstances as proof of any fact independently found by a competent and independent tribunal,” he said.
Mr Ledvina submitted that he was obliged to plead guilty “simply because his name was used in connection with nominee companies, and he was advised of a risk that his co-defendants would be offered reduced sentences to testify against him if he did not accept the plea bargain”.
He said he did not benefit from the fraud because he was not a party to it, would not have knowingly been a party to it and in fact had no knowledge of the improper use of his name, ID and electronic signature.
But the SDT rejected what it said was Mr Ledvina’s attempt to go behind the conviction.
“Notwithstanding Mr Ledvina’s attempt to imply that he was wrongly implicated in the conspiracy and the implicit assertion of his innocence, the tribunal had before it his clear and unequivocal acceptance of the facts as opened by the prosecutor to the court.
“The judge in the criminal proceedings took obvious pains to establish with Mr Ledvina that he understood the significance of his guilty plea to the charge of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and that, by pleading guilty, Mr Ledvina accepted without demur the conduct attributed to him by the prosecutor.”
The SDT changed its rules in 2019 so that only UK certificates of conviction were proof of the underlying facts but the Solicitors Regulation Authority argued that the US conviction was still admissible as conclusive proof of Mr Ledvina’s guilt. Mr Ledvina said it should not.
The tribunal agreed with the regulator. It explained that the 2019 change was “a deliberate decision to prevent automatic and unfair reliance on convictions from jurisdictions of dubious credibility for ‘offences’ which are no longer offences under domestic law.
“There was nothing to suggest, however, that the USA was a jurisdiction which should cause the tribunal any concern.”
It continued: “The tribunal considered that it could assume with sufficient certainty that the offence of fraud under US federal law contained at its core the essential elements which the public, either here or in USA would recognise, namely, deception, deceit and deliberate misrepresentation.”
The SDT concluded that, by virtue of the conviction, he had taken unfair advantage of the victims of the fraud, lacked integrity, damaged public trust and was dishonest.
Mr Ledvina was struck off the roll and ordered to pay costs of £3,675.
Isn’t this the same argument that DOD used to incriminate detainees at Gitmo