Ex-lawyer keeps house for now

Court

A lawyer sentenced to home detention on sex offences is likely to see out the sentence having staved off legal action from a disgruntled former client who is trying to sell his home.

But the concession comes at a cost to Quentin Stobart Haines, who must pay $5582 a month from mid-april to help meet the financing costs of the mortgage holder, a trust related to his former client.

Haines’ six-month home detention sentence was imposed in the Palmerston North District Court for hiring two teenage girls for sex. The legal age for prostitution is 18. The sentence is due to end on March 28. Losing his home, just south of Levin, could have seen him resentenced if he could not find an alternative home detention address.

Haines stopped practising as a lawyer around the time he pleaded guilty in August 2018.

In the High Court at Wellington, Justice Christine Grice extended an injunction that stopped action to sell Haines’s house, but on conditions he must meet. The injunction is due to be reconsidered in three months.

Haines’ family trust owns the property, which is subject to more than one mortgage.

The mortgages are part of complex and disputed transactions involving one of Haines’s former clients, Harry Memelink, and Lynx Trustees. They are behind another trust buying one of the Haines mortgages from a finance company, which itself was preparing to exercise its rights to sell the property for non-payment of the mortgage.

Having bought the mortgage, the new mortgage holder began taking steps to have a mortgagee sale of Haines’s lifestyle block.

Memelink and Lynx Trustees Ltd have been sued to stop the sale. Memelink is bankrupt, but is trying to have the bankruptcy annulled. He and the trust were guarantors of the loan they later took over.

Haines says that whatever he owes under the mortgage can be covered by the more than $1 million Memelink still owes him for legal work. He says Memelink should have been paying the mortgage in lieu of not paying his bill, but that agreement is one of the many disputes in the case, and the judge described it as a ‘‘very unusual oral arrangement’’ for which Haines had not produced any supporting evidence.

The judge said the disentangling of the business affairs of Memelink, Haines and their respective interests would take some time.