The claimants were the corporate trustees of two family trusts established respectively by a deed of variation relating to the will of Oliver Cutts (the 1997 trust), and by the will of Susan Cutts (the will trust). The beneficiaries of these trusts were Susan’s children, grandchildren and remoter issue who were living on or born before specified dates.
The primary asset of the trusts was Folds Farm, a farm in the New Forest in Hampshire comprising various buildings and farmland totalling almost 340 acres. The majority of the farm was within the will trust, while the 1997 trust com...
The trustees of two Jersey trusts known as the Piedmont Trust and the Riviera Trust made a Public Trustee v Cooper Category 2 type application for a ‘blessing’ of their decision to make distributions that would exhaust the funds of those trusts.
Detailed background to the trusts and of disputes that had previously arisen in relation to them was set out in Re Jasmine Trustees Ltd and Piedmont Trust [2015] (the 2015 judgment) and Re Piedmont Trust and Riviera Trust [2018] (the 2018 judgment).
The Piedmont Trust was a revocable discretionary trust es...
The Ashden Trust and the Mark Leonard Trust (the charities) were charitable trusts whose principal purposes were environmental protection and the relief of poverty.
The trustees of the charities sought the court’s blessing for an investment policy inspired by the Paris Climate Agreement (the Paris Agreement). The Paris Agreement’s primary objective was to limit global warming to 1.5 – 2 degrees, below pre-industrial levels, in part by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and by promoting ‘climate resilient development’.
The charities’ investment policy stood to exclude investm...
William Reid (the deceased) died on 20 March 2018. He left a will dated 20 December 2004 and codicil dated 8 February 2012 (together the will), which appointed the claimants, Nicholas Parsons and Mark Hill (respectively the deceased’s solicitor and land agent), as executors and trustees, and left the residuary estate on discretionary trusts for classes including his children and grandchildren. The defendants, Stephen Reid and Judith Shaw, were the deceased’s children. The deceased also left a letter of wishes which expressed the wish that payments be made to Stephen reflecting various mo...
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...
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New Quadrant Trust Corporation Ltd (the trustee), a professional trustee corporation and trustee of a discretionary trust (the trust), decided to sell the trust’s shares in a company known as Lifetime Home Securities Ltd (LHS), such shares representing approximately 25% of the value within the trust. LHS had traded in home equity release arrangements but was then non-trading, with around 13 properties remaining on its portfolio and a remaining director who was 92 years old. The trustee considered that a sale of the shares was more tax efficient, would diversify the trust’s portfolio and ...
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...
The settlement, a discretionary trust governed by the law of Jersey, was established on 18 July 2011 (the settlement). The settlor, then the chairman of an oil exploration company, originally settled £35,000. Subsequently, a further sum of $15m was settled by the settlor’s wife on 12 February 2012. The principal beneficiary, who was the chief executive officer of the oil company, and the immediate members of his family were the beneficiaries of the settlement. The second to fifth respondents (the English claimants) issued proceedings in the English High Court against the settlor, allegin...