_{Sadly, the hole he kept digging didn't contain any lottery treasure}

A solicitor has failed in his appeal against a four-year jail sentence, after he defrauded clients of almost £2m in a bid to chase a bogus lottery win. The Court of Appeal said "if anything" the sentence was "lenient". 

Hugh Lansdell was Senior Partner at Norwich-based firm Hansells, where he had worked for 30 years, and which had been his father's firm before him. When fraudsters contacted him to say he had won £825,000 in a Spanish postcode lottery, he took the bait and responded.

Presumably not quite believing their luck that such a senior lawyer could be so naïve, the crooks told Lansdell that the jackpot was actually £1.825m, and he needed to cough up a 'non-resident tax' for the cash. The scammers then demanded further payments*.

The experienced solicitor handed over all his and his wife's money to the crooks, before stealing from the firm's client accounts in a bid to release the non-existent money. 

Over a two year period from 2015 to 2017, Lansdell made 72 fraudulent payments totalling around £1.85m from client accounts, as well as investment portfolios held on trust in his control. 29 of Hansells’ clients and two charities were affected.

Lansdell initially told the firm that the money had been invested in a scheme. However, he was finally busted when a partner demanded the funds be returned and Lansdell failed to give the money back. 

In 2019, the SDT struck him off the roll. Last year, Lansdell appeared before the Norwich Crown Court where he admitted fraud by abuse of position and was sentenced to four years in prison.  

The former lawyer has now applied to appeal against the sentence, arguing that the crown court failed to give sufficient consideration to his personal mitigation. 

The Court of Appeal judge, Mrs Justice Stacey, noted that there was "considerable" mitigation as Lansdell had no previous convictions; was "a pillar" of the local community; and had planned to use the supposed winnings "mainly for good causes and not for a lavish lifestyle". In falling for the scam, the lawyer had lost "everything...his reputation, his marriage, his home, his job," and "his wealth".

However, the appeal judge also said that Lansdell had "lied repeatedly to his staff, to his partners and to his clients", and his offending "caused serious financial and reputational damage to Hansells Solicitors".

Mrs Justice Stacey deemed that in sentencing, the recorder at Norwich crown court had taken "full account of all the personal mitigation and factors related to the offence" and "was merciful in not making an upward adjustment to reflect the scale of the offending and the harm caused." 

The sentence was at "the very bottom of the range", said the judge, and the recorder was "magnanimous" in giving a 20% discount for Lansdell's guilty plea (made just four days before trial) when other judges may have considered that a lower discount was "appropriate".

Lansdell also argued that certain remarks made by the recorder at the plea hearing (acknowledging that Lansdell had been the victim of a crime and there was compelling mitigation) were "inconsistent with the sentencing hearing". But the Court of Appeal said that while that recorder had expressed some empathy for the "desperately sad case", he had made "no promises as to sentence" at the plea hearing, and had stated that "all options were open".

"If anything, this was a lenient sentence," ruled Mrs Justice Stacey, refusing the appeal.

_{A tip for readers who are contacted by scammers on how to respond.}