Wayne John Revell was struck off as a lawyer on December 16, 2022 at a tribunal hearing in Auckland after admitting 10 years of tax evasion. Photo / Supplied
Wayne John Revell was struck off as a lawyer on December 16, 2022 at a tribunal hearing in Auckland after admitting 10 years of tax evasion. Photo / Supplied
A Hamilton lawyer who evaded income tax for 10 years and spent client money at a Cosmopolitan Club has been struck off.
Wayne John Revell, 62, represented himself when he appeared before the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal in Auckland for a penalty hearing on Friday afternoon, unsuccessfully seeking tobe suspended instead of struck off for good.
Last month the tribunal found he had committed wilful misconduct arising from “irregularities” with his trust account, where lawyers hold client funds.
Revell made 13 payments from his trust account to his personal practice account.
Some of these payments were later reversed but ledger notations were misleading, said tribunal deputy chairman Dr John Adams.
Revell’s practice account had fallen to just $6.99 when he transferred three sums from his trust account totalling $1123.50. Revell spent all of that over the next two days.
“The bulk of the expenses were payments to Hamilton Cosmopolitan Club or Eastside Tavern,” Adams said.
Around that time his former partner in the law firm Tanner Fitzgerald, John Campion, aged 80 at the time, faced sentencing after admitting to evading paying income tax for 13 years.
“Mr Revell said he was under stress and that those three days passed like one day,” Adams said in a judgment.
“He volunteered that alcohol may have been involved. We infer that he spent a lot of money indulgently on himself over those few days.”
He was also obliged to retain $12,000 in the trust account pending completion of certain work but allowed the account to drop below that level several times.
Revell himself narrowly avoided a prison term for evading income tax for 10 years after repaying the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) the tax he avoided shortly before sentencing late in 2020.
Wayne John Revell pleaded guilty to the tax evasion charge on the day his trial was set to begin at the Hamilton District Court in 2019. He narrowly avoided a prison sentence after paying the money back. Photo / File
A year earlier, he pleaded guilty to the tax evasion on the day the trial was to start. He had been given several warnings by the IRD but ignored the mounting problem, Adams said.
When Revell appeared again before Adams and other tribunal members, he sought to be suspended as a lawyer rather than struck off. He said he was willing to operate without a trust account and be supervised.
“It means a lot to me to be a lawyer, I worked hard to be a lawyer,” he said.
“I’ve always done the best I can apart from these two times.”
He acknowledged he had let himself and the profession down.
“I really did trust my managing partner more than I trusted the IRD,” he said.
“I’m more than willing to suffer that consequence as a result of my actions as long as I can practise at some time in the future.”
He said he had actively pursued and undertaken pro bono work on many occasions for clients who could not afford to pay.
Revell said he was saddened when the Citizens Advice Bureau said they didn’t want his free services any more due to the tax evasion.
Meredith Connell lawyer Matthew Mortimer-Wang, representing the Waikato Bay of Plenty Standards Committee, said the seriousness of the misconduct meant a strike-off remained very much on the table.
Revell had a fundamental obligation to uphold the rule of law as a lawyer and breached that for 10 years, Mortimer-Wang said.
He said Revell had framed his misconduct as inadvertence, when the tribunal had found wilful breaches of the rules.
It remained unclear if the tribunal would make a decision or reserve its judgment when the members retired to deliberate.
But after a period of a few minutes they returned to the hearing room.
“The decision is that we are going to strike off Mr Revell as a lawyer,” Adams said. Full reasons are to be given later in writing.
The order was effective from Friday and Revell was also ordered to pay costs to the NZ Law Society.
Only a handful of lawyers each year are struck off from the roll of barristers and solicitors, meaning they can no longer practise as a lawyer in New Zealand.
Revell is the ninth to be struck off since 2020, according to information published by the Law Society.
