A lawyer who stole his elderly client’s life savings and went to prison for it has been allowed to practise law again.

Leuatea Iosefa was jailed in 2008 for 10 months after he stole $83,700 from an 83-year-old woman and was struck from the roll of barristers and solicitors shortly afterwards meaning he could no longer practise as a lawyer.

After a nearly 20-year hiatus from the legal profession, and against his “forbidding background”, Iosefa applied for another practising certificate earlier this year.

However, because the New Zealand Law Society opposed his application, as did four practising lawyers, he had to convince the same tribunal that banished him from the fold to allow him to re-join the legal fraternity.

“I thought I would pay back the money when the time came. But things snowballed,” Iosefa told the tribunal last month.

Iosefa said his problems began when his mother died and as the head of his family he felt culturally obligated to pay for a large, $70,000 funeral for her. This compounded with issues meeting his mortgage repayments and a large tax bill to the IRD which could have left him bankrupt.

He told the tribunal that his pride prevented him from reaching out to his family for help and instead opted to dip into his client’s trust account to first pay off the IRD and then to keep his firm afloat.

“I basically just buried my head in the sand. There were other options available to me and I didn’t take them … There was an element of desperation,” he said. “It was just pure pride. I made a decision which was totally out of character.”

Over the course of nearly six years, Iosefa’s client made $30,000 worth of withdrawals from her account which were either late or less than the amount she had requested.

So, in 2006, the woman made a complaint to the Law Society and an investigation began into her missing funds.

Iosefa was able to pay the woman back in full but was still taken to court where he was sentenced to 10 months in jail in 2008 for theft from a person in a special relationship and ordered to pay the woman a further $20,000 in reparation.

Iosefa successfully appealed his sentence shortly after being imprisoned and was instead given four months home detention.

“I am a different person now,” Iosefa told the tribunal, having been to counselling shortly after his sentence and spending nearly two decades reflecting on his mistakes.

Counsel for the Law Society’s Standards Committee Richard Committee Richard Moon opened his submissions with a quote often attributed to famed author C.S. Lewis.

“Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking,” Moon said. “Integrity has to come from inside.”

Moon questioned whether attending counselling nearly 15 years ago was enough to address the issues that surrounded Iosefa’s offending and said that him simply telling the tribunal he had changed wasn’t enough.

“Where you have [this] kind of offending you can’t simply rely on the individual’s word for their insight,” he said.

However, today the tribunal issued its ruling finding that Iosefa was a fit and proper person able to re-enter the legal profession.

“Mr Iosefa convinced us that he has been humbled, not only by public and family exposure of his weak conduct but also by reflection as time has gone by.

“We are satisfied that he has achieved insight into the factors that led to his vulnerability . We are satisfied that he has regained his good character.”

The tribunal said that since his “fall from grace” he had completed both a Master’s degree as well as a Doctorate of Philosophy in Law, had written cultural reports for use in criminal courts and his knowledge of Samoan language and culture meant he could be an asset to the legal community again.

The tribunal has granted Iosefa’s application but he will only be allowed to be an employee of a law firm, as opposed to operating on his own, for two years.

His return to the roll marks him as one of the only lawyers in recent years who were struck off for dishonesty offending to earn redemption at the tribunal.

Last year Christopher Twigley launched a failed bid to revive his own legal career after being struck from the roll for stealing thousands from six clients’ trust accounts.

Davina Reid also petitioned the tribunal, and later the High Court, for reinstatement to the roll after she was struck off for smuggling an iPhone and cigarettes to a convicted murderer prisoner whom she later married.

Iosefa said in a statement to NZME that he was grateful for the opportunity to practise law again and believed he had much still to offer the profession and the community.

Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.