W was the founder of WBL, an internationally renowned publisher of children’s books. In 1989 W instructed solicitors to create an employee trust (WBET) for WBL and transferred 51% of the WBL shares into WBET. The remainder of the shares were divided amongst family trusts established by W.
W died in 1991 and the shares in WBL held by the family trusts were distributed to employees and officers of WBL through a qualifying employee share ownership trust and a share incentive plan. Some of those shares were acquired from employees by the WBL Employee Share Ownership Plan (ESOP).
<...By a trust instrument dated 29 April 1986 (the 1986 deed), Stephenson Clarke Shipping Ltd, a subsidiary of Powell Duffryn plc and member of the Powell Duffryn group of companies (the PD Group), as the named settlor, settled cash and securities on a discretionary trust for the benefit of employees and former employees of the PD Group (the trust). The trust defined the beneficiaries as ‘the employees and their spouses and dependants and the former employees and their spouses from time to time during the trust period [being the period expiring eighty years from the date of the trust] of the...
On 23 October 2020 the Bermuda Supreme Court granted a Public Trustee v Cooper Category 2 application for a ‘blessing’ of the applicant trustees’ decision to develop preliminary proposals for the future administration of an apparently very valuable group of private trusts, referred to as ‘the X Trusts’. The preliminary proposals contemplated restructuring the X Trusts by way of an unequal division of the trust assets between two branches of the beneficiary family. One branch of the family supported these proposals, the other did not.
Implementation of the trustees’ propos...
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The claimants were the trustees of a settlement settled by the deceased’s father. The defendants were the deceased’s three children. Under the terms of the settlement the deceased enjoyed a special power of appointment which could be exercised in respect of property described in the fund, whether by deeds revocable or irrevocable or by will or codicil. The deceased had exercised this power twice. First, by a deed of appointment in 1981, with effect from her death, the deceased appointed the fund between the three defendants. Second, by a deed of revocation in 1997, expressed to be supple...
Continue reading "Trusts: Lost in translation"