A solicitor who ripped off a sex dungeon master has been sentenced to seven and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to 43 fraud offences.

34-year-old Andrew Davies, who took a distinction on his LPC at Nottingham Law School, joined Manchester firm Robert Meaton & Co as a trainee in 2006. Six years later he took over the firm and became its sole equity partner when the founder, Robert Meaton, died.

Davies got busy fast. Meaton's will left him the firm on condition that he paid £170,000 to three benefactors. Davies paid them using money he took from the client account. He raided it for another £630,000 over two years until an SRA intervention and the firm's collapse, at which point he blamed his colleagues and claimed the firm's accounts had been hacked.

During his reign Davies developed a passion for forgery. He forged emails, he forged land registry forms and he forged 29 building regulation certificates. He produced a fake QC's opinion vouching for an SDLT avoidance scheme, which he then used to recommend the scheme to a client. Davies also created fake IDs on his firm's financial systems to pay himself clients' mortgage monies.



His victims included colleagues, a friend for whom he served as best man at his wedding, and a sex dungeon master. Shaun O'Driscoll was tricked by Davies into believing that he would be paid £710,000 compensation by Channel 4 in relation to a documentary about him called 'My Slaves and Me'. When O'Driscoll asked the court for a copy of the judgment, he discovered Davies, who has already been struck off, had never submitted the claim. 

Before he was due to be sentenced at Bolton Crown Court, Davies vanished and threatened to kill himself. He was found down the road having a cup of coffee, and arrested. Judge Timothy Stead told Davies, "Your offending was dishonest and astonishingly extreme and the impact upon victims is especially significant. This is a man who lies so often that it is clearly part of his make up". In a statement, O'Driscoll said Davies was "a truly weak individual, who is incapable of telling anything of the truth".
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Comments

Anonymous 15 June 18 14:54

In a statement, O'Driscoll said Davies was "a truly weak individual, who is incapable of telling anything of the truth"...And then cracked his cat 'o nine tails - *whu-tish!*

Anonymous 18 June 18 14:10

In a statement Davies also claimed "he was training for the Olympic cycling team, was going to be a QC and become an MP and become a football writer for the Guardian, but not necessarily in that order."