Attorney linked to clients’ missing settlement money disbarred

TAMPA, Fla. -- The state’s highest court issued an order permanently disbarring a once popular Tampa attorney now accused of withholding his clients’ settlement money.

The Florida Supreme Court issued the order disbarring Jose Toledo as of May 14.

ABC Action News first exposed allegations about the missing settlement last summer after Toledo’s personal injury clients contacted ABC Action News saying he never sent their settlement checks.

Toledo practiced personal injury and immigration law in the Tampa Bay area for two decades.

Nearly 50 of Toledo’s clients have filed complaints with the Florida Bar and last fall, the Bar petitioned a judge to suspend the well-known attorney.

Court records show Toledo is accused of wiping out three different trust accounts that held settlement money.

Toledo’s whereabouts are currently unknown and he was last seen in August in Tennessee, where he was arrested on a domestic assault charge.

The Florida Supreme Court also ordered Toledo to pay more than $2,300 in court costs, but the order did not mention repayment his clients’ settlement money.

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Attorney linked to clients’ missing settlement money disbarred

Brother of Local Attorney Charged with Theft

The brother of a local attorney who is on the run from police after allegedly stealing millions of dollars from his personal injury clients is also in trouble with the law.

According to court testimony Malcolm Snipes was picked up at his grandson’s Little League Championship game in Harris County after allegedly withdrawing thousands of dollars from a trust used for settlement funds that was supposed to be paid to his brother’s clients.

The 74 year old brother and employee of William Snipes had five felony warrants for his arrest by the time Investigators caught up with him and more charges pending.

A police detective told the judge the multi million dollar theft scam was a family affair with funds transferred into family members accounts and surveillance video from a local BB&T bank proves it.

Malcolm Snipes made multiple withdrawals from that trust account, each time careful not to take more than ten thousand dollars , the threshold amount required to report to the IRS.

His defense attorney Bobby Jones said Malcolm Snipes was a signature on the account even though the State Bar permits Licensed Attorneys only to hold such settlement accounts.

Malcolm Snipes is not an attorney.

“If I work for an attorney that did personal injury law and I was on the account and the attorney suggested  that I go get the money out of the account then I would go get the money out of the account if I was a non lawyer and didn’t know Bar rules,” attorney Robert Jones said.

In a contentious back and forth with Prosecutors the defense attorney suggested the arrest of Malcolm Snipes was a mere ploy to find William Snipes whose been spotted in Mississippi and Alabama since the scandal broke.

“Many times I’ve seen police put pressure on other people in order to squeeze them so to speak to either get evidence on the person they’re really after, the target of the investigation or to possibly get the target to come in because an innocent pawn so to speak has been arrested and they wouldn’t want that to happen to that person,” Jones said.

As the wife of Malcolm Snipes appeared outside the courtroom, Some of her brother in law’s distraught clients appeared too, unable to contain their anger as they made their way from the parking lot

Police say more than 30 victims have come forward to report their personal injury claims, now in the millions were ripped off.

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Brother of Local Attorney Charged with Theft

Ex-business partner says Donisthorpe ‘was really slick’

Darrell Pitchford, a former business partner of Paul Donisthorpe, appears in this screen shot from a Facebook page. Pitchford said he, too, was swindled by Donisthorpe, who funneled client trust funds into a Texas cattle operation.

Paul Donisthorpe and Darrell Pitchford were competitors showing cattle at the New Mexico State Fair when Donisthorpe got tired of Pitchford winning all the prizes.

So Donisthorpe pitched the idea of them going into business together. Eight years later, Pitchford rues the day he agreed to the partnership.

“I never want to hear his name again in my life,” Pitchford said last week in a telephone interview from his Athens, Texas, ranch.

Donisthorpe had been the “money man” for the 100-head Corazon-Pitchford cattle operation that featured prized Santa Gertrudis cows.

But it turns out a large chunk of the cash Donisthorpe had been pumping into the business came from the trust accounts of vulnerable and special needs clients whose accounts Donisthorpe managed at the Albuquerque-based Desert State Life Management.

“It’s like when you’re on top of the world and you get your chair pulled out from under you,” Pitchford said. He said he had no idea Donisthorpe had swindled Desert State trust clients until the news broke in Albuquerque last June.

“He was really, really slick,” Pitchford said. “He was good as gold to my family. Super nice. We never argued. We were building a really good herd.”

Donisthorpe served as deputy New Mexico State Fair director in the 1980s, but he and another top fair official resigned in 1989 amid reports of financial mismanagement.

After the Desert State revelations came to light, Pitchford discovered Donisthorpe hadn’t paid $300,000 owed to TransOva, a firm that helped with cow embryo placement and development at their Texas cattle operation.

Unbeknownst to Pitchford, Donisthorpe also had changed the articles of incorporation to show he owned 67 percent of the Corazon-Pitchford cattle company. Pitchford said they agreed to Donisthorpe’s owning 51 percent.

“From the very beginning, when they founded the company, Donisthorpe was already cheating him,” said Scott Fuqua of Santa Fe, Pitchford’s attorney.

“I’ve got a long ways to go to pay off all the debt,” Pitchford said, saying he can relate to the plight of the trust clients who were robbed.

“Heck, I was as much a victim as they were.”

The cattle operation is among the assets state and federal investigators are hoping to tap for victim restitution.

New Mexico Financial Securities Division senior counsel Kevin Graham and FID acting chief Christopher Moya traveled to Texas to check out the prospects of recovery.

“It turns out the value of cattle is a lot less than we hoped,” Graham said. “Maybe thousands, but certainly not hundreds of thousands.”

Pitchford nevertheless will be negotiating a settlement with the state, state officials said.

Pitchford plans to start over with a new financial backer but is “pretty much” out of luck in trying to recover his losses, Fuqua said.

“He would be drilling the same dry hole that everybody else is drilling, and that’s Donisthorpe.”

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Ex-business partner says Donisthorpe ‘was really slick’

Richmond real estate lawyer may be unable to repay clients

In new court documents Richmond real estate lawyer Hong Guo claims she has “insolvency concerns” and that a trust fund shortage from her firm’s accounts affects more clients than she has previously identified.

Previously, it was reported that a number of Chinese investors and B.C. real estate professionals are suing Guo, alleging $2.1 million in losses, after Guo says more than $7.5 million was stolen from her trust account in early 2016. The trust fund shortage affected property transactions and left a number of Chinese investors unable to pay tax bills on Canadian real estate transactions, legal filings say.

But, according to Guo’s latest court filing, “the extent of the trust shortage is still not known with certainty.”

In an affidavit filed in B.C. Supreme Court Dec. 28, Guo says that about 99 clients were affected by the alleged trust fund theft. This figure is much larger than Guo’s statement in a Sept. 12 B.C. Supreme Court examination, in which she told a lawyer for one of her Chinese clients that only 60 clients were affected.

“I cannot state with total certainty that my assets and those of Guo Law Corporation are sufficient to make whole all of the approximately 99 clients affected by the theft of funds,” Guo’s Dec. 28 affidavit says. “The extent of the liability from filed or potential actions is unknown and growing.”

In a recent interview, Guo said that her law firm completes about $700 million in real estate transactions a year, and she owns enough assets to pay back anyone claiming losses against her and her firm in the case.

The B.C. Law Society has taken custodianship of part of Guo’s practice and has imposed trust fund conditions, including that Guo can’t make payments to clients affected by the shortage except through the society’s custodian.

Letters filed in court from the manager of custodianship, Michael Rhodes, show he rejected Guo’s Dec. 16 client repayment plan and pointed to potential breaches of the conditions that Guo is under.

A Nov. 29 letter from Guo’s office to Rhodes discloses that Nai Zhang, a client in China who is owed about $1.69 million and has not apparently filed court actions against Guo in B.C., contacted Guo via WeChat and said that she wanted to be excluded from the Law Society custodianship and to be repaid interest on her principal until the debt was paid off, “and Ms. Guo essentially agreed.”

“From what you say … Ms. Guo has agreed to pay interest to Ms. Zhang in priority to all of the other CIBC (trust fund) clients,” Rhodes replied. “In my opinion, to the extent Ms. Guo has made such payments, she is in breach of the order.”

In a Dec. 21 letter, Rhodes states that Guo doesn’t have the power to sell her assets as proposed in her repayment plan. For example, Rhodes says, Guo says she owns 35 per cent of the shares of a company with interests in “Surrey Development Properties” but “her shares are subject to a beneficial interest of her sister.”

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Richmond real estate lawyer may be unable to repay clients