Joan Manuel Barrera Beltri, 50, engaged in unacceptable professional conduct, including the unsafe cutting of a gas pipe, failing to provide adequate written terms of engagement, and using inappropriate and abusive language in communications with clients and ARB staff, the regulator’s professional conduct committee (PCC) was told.
The incidents occurred between 2024 and 2025, after Beltri was hired through his company Archiproject to convert a Grade II-listed building in Winchester into a clinic for a nurse and her husband, an oral surgeon dentist.
The committee held that three matters amounted to unacceptable professional conduct. The committee also found shortcomings concerning building control and listed-building consent, but decided neither was sufficiently serious to amount to unacceptable professional conduct. A separate fire-safety allegation was not proved.
The most serious violations were the cutting of a gas pipe against the wishes of the client, and a period of insulting and threatening comments made after Beltri was removed from the project.
The committee heard that his client told him a skilled plumber should repair the pipe, which ran underneath the floor of the site. The committee heard that Beltri disregarded this instruction and carried out the work himself. A professional plumber who later visited the site said Beltri’s work ‘could have caused a serious gas leak’ if the valve was accidentally opened.
Although Beltri told the committee that he had experience and training in a ‘number of aspects of skilled work, including plumbing’, he did not demonstrate any training or knowledge regarding gas fittings. The committee concluded that he ‘did not carry out his work within the remit of his knowledge and/or carried out works that he was not trained to do’.
The project clients terminated Beltri’s contract following this incident, and began legal proceedings to recover the fees already paid, eventually submitting their claim to an adjudication by an arbitrator appointed by RIBA.
A formal complaint was made to the ARB on 25 April 2025, and for the remainder of that year Beltri ‘communicated with both [clients] and the ARB, by email, telephone calls and voice messages’, with a ‘number of those messages alleged to have been either insulting, threatening or otherwise inappropriate’.
The committee heard evidence that these communications included several insulting and threatening messages to the female client, escalating to the point at which Beltri allegedly made a call to an ARB employee where he ‘stated that he was so angry he would kill the [clients] and their child’.
Further phone calls and emails to the employee and the referrers allegedly included more violent threats as well as ‘obscene and often sexualised language’.
When called by the committee to give evidence regarding these allegations, the PCC decision notice stated he ‘refused to engage’ with the questions put to him by the committee and instead ‘shouted, swore, and left the hearing’.
Beltri, in his written defence, accepted that some communications had been inappropriate in tone and apologised. But during oral evidence he refused to accept that any were inappropriate and denied making threats to kill.
The committee decided that the testimonies from the two ARB employees were ‘in every respect reliable, honest, and helpful’, ultimately ruling that the allegation of inappropriate and/or abusive language was found proven.
In addition to these allegations, the committee also found that Beltri failed to provide a proper written agreement setting out his role, responsibilities, scope of work, fees, insurance, complaints procedure and other requirements before undertaking the work. This contributed to a dispute over whether he was acting as an architect or contractor.
Beltri was also found to have failed to submit an adequate building control application for the project, after his initial application was refused in November 2024.
His explanation at the committee hearing this year was that he had been in close contact with the building control officer throughout the project, and it was only the termination of his employment that meant that he was unable to comply with the building control requirements. The ARB acknowledged this but, nevertheless, concluded that the allegation was proven.
Separately, Beltri did not acquire the appropriate listed building consent to carry out minor work to the site, such as the removal of fixtures and fittings and the installation of new walls.
Although retrospective listed building consent was later obtained by the architect who took over the project, the committee ruled that the work should not have started before the necessary consent had been obtained.
There was also an allegation that Beltri had failed to carry out his work with ‘due skill and care in relation to fire safety on site’. However the committee concluded that this was not substantiated by the available evidence.
The committee concluded that, although Beltri had ‘‘developed some insight’ regarding some of his actions when working on the project, this did not extend to his conduct when communicating with the referrer, the ARB employee or during the committee hearing.
It was therefore decided by the committee that Beltri’s conduct was ‘fundamentally incompatible with continuing to be an architect’ and ‘too serious to be dealt with by any sanction other than erasure’.
Beltri will not be allowed to apply to rejoin the register for a period of three years.
Beltri’s practice, Archiproject, has since been dissolved following a voluntary strike-off from the Companies House register.