FCA bans Nurul Miah after SRA finds £28m client money fraud at Kingly Solicitors
The FCA has issued a full prohibition order against a formerly approved senior manager after the SRA found he dishonestly misappropriated more than £10m of client funds for personal benefit. Relevant to anyone holding client money or running fitness-and-propriety assessments.
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Worth reviewing if you hold client money or run fitness-and-propriety assessments. Routine otherwise.
The FCA has banned Nurul Miah (prohibition order, no formal reference number published at time of writing), also known as Neil Mia and Neil Miah, from working in financial services. The prohibition follows a Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) finding that Miah, acting as a non-legal manager (someone who manages the firm but is not a qualified solicitor) at Kingly Solicitors Limited, dishonestly caused or allowed more than £28m of client money to be taken from client accounts without permission between April 2019 and July 2020, of which more than £10m was used by Miah for his own benefit.
Miah was approved by the FCA in 2016 to work in senior management at Oracle Consultants Ltd, a firm entirely unconnected to Kingly Solicitors. The source does not specify when that approval ended or whether it remained in force during the period of misconduct. The FCA concluded that his conduct at the solicitors firm showed he lacked the honesty and integrity required to work in financial services, and that was sufficient basis for the full prohibition.
The FCA did not conduct its own parallel investigation into the client money loss; it relied on the SRA's findings to assess Miah's fitness and propriety for financial services roles. Conduct findings by other regulators, including the SRA, can feed directly into FCA fitness-and-propriety assessments. If someone holds or has held FCA approval and is found by another regulator to have acted dishonestly, the FCA will act on it.
The underlying conduct follows a familiar pattern: client money removed without permission, no authorisation obtained, personal enrichment. The scale is large; the control failures are not novel. If your client money controls are sound, treat this as a prompt to verify, not a warning shot. If you are not confident they are, the SRA's findings are referenced in the notes to editors of the FCA press release linked above.
