Mandeep Sunny Singh Thandi

Introduction

Mandeep Sunny Singh Thandi is a former English solicitor who was struck off the roll in 2026 after a disciplinary tribunal concluded that he had a criminal client pay her legal fees directly into his personal bank account and kept the arrangement hidden from his own firm. Thandi, 40, had been a solicitor since 2014 and was a director at the County Durham firm Kenneth M Barrow and Co when the misconduct came to light. He admitted dishonesty as part of a joint outcome agreed with the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal agreed that he should be struck off and pay £23,000 in costs.

Background Information

Thandi qualified as a solicitor in 2014 and spent his career in criminal defence work, rising to a directorship at Kenneth M Barrow and Co, a firm based in County Durham. A directorship at a high street criminal practice carries responsibility both for clients — many of them facing prosecution and trusting their adviser with their liberty — and for the firm’s financial integrity.

The client at the centre of the case was a criminal defendant who had not qualified for legal aid and was therefore paying for her representation privately. Because she would be funding the case herself, she asked for the firm’s bank details so she could transfer the fees — an ordinary request that Thandi turned into a private collection.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Adjudicated. Thandi admitted dishonesty as part of a joint agreed outcome with the Solicitors Regulation Authority and was struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, which also ordered him to pay £23,000 costs. These are regulatory findings, not criminal convictions.

When the privately paying client asked for the firm’s bank details, Thandi instead agreed fees of £6,000 with her and provided his own bank account. He did not ensure the matter was opened on the firm’s management or finance systems, as would usually happen, and the client went on to transfer £5,510 over four payments, all of which Thandi retained. To stop the arrangement from surfacing, he even paid counsel’s fees in the case out of his own bank account, concealing his conduct from his firm and keeping the client’s instructions ‘off the books’.

The scheme unravelled only when another solicitor representing the client contacted the firm to say that she had paid into Thandi’s own account. Confronted in an interview with the firm’s owner, Thandi tried to claim that he had provided his own bank details and received the client’s money in error. That account of innocent mistake did not survive: the tribunal later found that he “attempted to conceal his wrongdoing on more than one occasion” and that the misconduct “was deliberate, repeated, committed for a prolonged period, over several months”.

Public Reaction and Consequences

Once the true picture emerged, the firm acted quickly. Thandi was suspended, and he subsequently resigned in March 2024. The firm refunded the money to the client and recouped the sum by deducting it from a payment due to Thandi as part of a consultancy agreement.

The regulatory reckoning came through a joint outcome agreed between Thandi and the SRA, in which he admitted dishonesty and accepted that he would be struck off the roll; the SDT endorsed that outcome, including an order for £23,000 costs. In mitigation that the regulator did not agree, he claimed to have been experiencing significant personal difficulties at the time of the misconduct and said the episode had been an isolated incident. The tribunal’s assessment was withering: “He knew or ought reasonably to have known that his conduct was in material breach of his obligations to protect the public and reputation of the profession.”

Current Status

Thandi has been struck off the roll and can no longer practise as a solicitor. He is subject to the £23,000 costs order, and the £5,510 he took from the client has been returned by the firm, which clawed the money back from a payment due to him. His claims of significant personal difficulties and a one-off lapse were expressly not agreed by the SRA and did nothing to alter the outcome, which had itself been fixed in advance by his own admission of dishonesty.

Impact on Their Career/Life

The strike-off ended a legal career of more than a decade, including a directorship, and attached a finding of dishonesty that follows a solicitor permanently: removal from the roll means he cannot practise, and admitted dishonesty is the gravest mark a professional regulator can attach. Beyond the ban itself, the affair cost him financially through the £23,000 costs order and the firm’s deduction of the refunded money from his consultancy payment, and it converted a senior role at a County Durham practice into a cautionary tale.

The case is also a study in how concealment works: not a single slip, but a pattern — a matter kept off the firm’s systems, fees diverted to a personal account, barristers paid privately so the firm would not see the money moving — sustained over several months and exposed only because another solicitor asked the firm a straightforward question about where the client’s fees had gone. For a criminal solicitor, whose clients often pay at the most precarious moments of their lives, the tribunal’s finding that he breached his obligations to protect the public and the reputation of the profession marked the distance between a trusted local director and a struck-off former solicitor.

Sources

• Law Gazette, “Solicitor kept client ‘off the books’ to pocket fees directly,” May 29, 2026 — source