The Facilitator
Disbarment of an attorney has been ordered by the Maryland Court of Appeals
This attorney disciplinary matter concerns a Maryland-barred attorney who acted as a facilitator in a complex money laundering scheme that induced investors to advance funds in exchange for a false promise of a full return of the advanced fees and a future construction loan under the guise of an escrow agreement. Specifically, Respondent Jeneba Jalloh Ghatt (“Respondent” or “Ms. Ghatt”) agreed that her law firm would serve as escrow agent, which in effect converted her attorney trust account into a repository for the advanced fee scam. Although Respondent may not have initially been a knowing participant involved in the complex fraudulent scheme, she ultimately became complicit in the scam when she failed to verify and safeguard the advanced funds and then misrepresented her disbursements of those funds. For these reasons, we disbar Ms. Ghatt.
The court
In this case, we have concluded that Ms. Ghatt engaged in intentional dishonest conduct and that she misused trust money. Ms. Ghatt specifically represented to [complainant] Mr. Yates, by way of the Confirmation of Deposit, that she had personally verified and confirmed the existence of a sub-account holding $500,000 in the Ghatt Law Group attorney trust account. However, Ms. Ghatt’s testimony revealed that she merely relied on the same Confirmation of Deposit that Strategic Capital had sent her rather than verifying the sub-account by investigating with Citibank and her attorney trust account. In addition, Ms. Ghatt sent a screenshot of her Citibank attorney trust account to both Mr. Seiler, acting as Mr. Yates’s attorney, and Bar Counsel, suggesting that she was holding the $500,000 owed to Mr. Yates despite full knowledge that her brother had linked his own account to Citibank and that he had sent her the screenshots. These are the two most troubling instances of dishonest conduct, which constituted violations of MLRPC 3.3, 8.1, and 8.4.
The link to oral argument may be found here. (Mike Frisch)