“I don’t think I’ve ever been intentionally focused on breaking the law, ever. What happened in 2014 was a complete mess but it happened because I wasn’t thinking the right way.”
Twigley told the tribunal he would never repeat his previous dishonest actions.
The catalyst for that conduct was financial difficulty, he said, after a divorce, the bank underselling several of his homes and having been bankrupt three times.
It led to him sending a memo to staff at his Tauranga practice in 2014, instructing them to hand their work phones in and ordering them to “work harder”.
Twigley then approached a client and asked for a loan of $150,000, which he said was to help expand his business.
“Having gone through this nightmare and realised how stupid I was there’s no way in the world I would go near a client to borrow money again,” he told the tribunal.
“I can see that so clearly now but at the time I had my priorities all wrong. I was deluded.”
As well as borrowing the substantial sum, he was found to have embezzled thousands from several other clients.
He previously described the embezzlement as “firefighting”.
In 2014, Twigley borrowed $4000 from a client before asking to borrow a further $50,000 which the man refused. Twigley went on to withdraw $30,000 from the man’s dead mother’s trust account and deposited it into his own.
The same year, Twigley was administering a person’s estate when he removed $3500 from the trust account and did not provide an invoice.
While acting for another client in relation to their son’s estate he took a further $3000 from the estate and deposited it into his own account.
Roughly $10,000 of the money he took from the clients’ accounts was used to pay his staff.
Twigley told the tribunal he had learned from his mistakes but admitted he had not repaid his clients and had not apologised to them.
He said he had no money to pay them.
“I haven’t been in a position to recompense anyone. I’ve struggled financially for a long time,” Twigley said.
Paul Collins, counsel for the standards committee opposing Twigley’s bid to practice again, questioned how he could be trusted with money if he could not make right his previous wrongs.
Collins said Twigley was “excessively ambitious” but lacked basic business management skills, which was why he encountered financial difficulty in the first place.
He also noted Twigley had not mentioned in his disclosure to the tribunal that he had been bankrupt and had instead given his “life story”.
“Why did you think the tribunal would be interested in your enthusiasm for surfing and judo and going to the Blue Pot tavern, but not the fact you had been bankrupt?” Collins asked.
“You included things that were barely relevant but excluded things that were.”
Collins said Twigley’s statements “resounded with self-pity” and he lacked empathy and insight into the clients whose interests he betrayed.
Simply saying he had rehabilitated was not enough, Collins said.
Twigley said he had not tried to mislead the tribunal but had simply forgotten to mention the bankruptcies.
Collins asked whether Twigley had studied New Zealand law since being struck off, to which Twigley replied he had reviewed his old files periodically and provided informal legal advice to his friends and family members.
Twigley’s lawyer, Simon Jefferson, KC, said his client had made a series of “dumb decisions” but was not trying to hide from them.
“He does not seek to sweep his past transgressions under the carpet,” Jefferson said.
“But redemption is possible. The bar cannot be set so high that you cannot get back in.
“It cannot be a no chance at all.”
Jefferson referenced the case of recently struck-off lawyer Alwyn O’Connor who was admitted to the bar despite having served time in prison for abusing a child as well as having a raft of dishonesty convictions to his name.
He said other lawyers had been granted practising certificates despite having much more-serious blemishes on their records.
“He didn’t do physical harm to an infant for example.”
Jefferson said Twigley was not simply saying he had “done his time” but rather he had carefully reflected on what had happened.
“He isn’t saying ‘I’ve been punished enough’… he’s saying ‘I am rehabilitated’.”
While the tribunal noted it had previously made orders that other lawyers pay their debts before being granted a practising certificate, Jefferson said his client was “skint”.
“He doesn’t even have the money to get on a flight to attend this hearing,” Jefferson said.
The tribunal will issue its decision on whether to grant Twigley a practising certificate in writing at a later date.
