Re X Trusts [2022] WTLR 355

Wills & Trusts Law Reports | Spring 2022 #186

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...

PTNZ v AS & ors [2020] WTLR 1423

Wills & Trusts Law Reports | Winter 2020 #181

In the course of the claimant’s application as trustee of four discretionary trusts in similar terms governed by English law for the blessing of momentous decisions, AS (the settlor and the original protector of the trusts) died.

The trusts had been varied soon after they were declared to expand the powers of the protector to give and withhold consent to the exercise of powers by the trustee. In the absence of a protector the trustee was free to exercise those powers without obtaining a third-party consent. The trusts were administered in Jersey on behalf of the claimant, a profes...