Former Ashurst IT worker caught selling firm laptops

Barred from legal profession

A former IT worker at Ashurst has been barred from working in the legal profession after selling two of the firm’s laptops.

Irfan Malik, who was an IT service desk analyst at Ashurst’s London office at the time, took two laptops from the firm’s IT storeroom in October 2023 “without its knowledge or consent” and sold them to a local business owner for £500, according to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).

Malik attended a meeting with the firm in March of this year after it discovered the two laptops were missing and that one had been connected to the same Wi-Fi network he used on his work computer. The IT worker claimed to know nothing about the whereabouts of the missing laptops and was unable to explain why they had been traced to the address of a local business.

The SRA’s report states that Malik attended another meeting with the firm a little over a week later, during which he admitted the laptops were at his house after he paid the local business owner £500 to get them back. He informed the firm that the business owner had bought both devices from someone on the marketplace website Gumtree, but couldn’t explain why one of them had previously been connected to his home Wi-Fi.

At a follow-up meeting the next day, Malik eventually admitted to taking the laptops before selling them. He also confessed to logging onto at least one of the laptops from his home address, contradicting his earlier denials.

The SRA said that, due to Malik’s “dishonest” conduct, it would be undesirable for him to be involved in a legal practice. He was issued a Section 43 order, which prohibits him from working for any regulated law firm without the SRA’s approval.

An Ashurst spokesperson told Legal Cheek: “We have robust processes in place to ensure the integrity of our equipment. Having become aware of the matter, the firm immediately took the appropriate steps to both investigate and report the incident.”