An increasingly common succession planning strategy is to incorporate a company to act as appointor of a family discretionary trust (in addition to a company being appointed as trustee of that trust). A corporate appointor is usually only appropriate where the underlying family has sophisticated succession planning objectives, such as a…

The trustee of a trust will usually be either a corporate trustee or one or more individual trustees. In most jurisdictions, a maximum of four individual trustees are permitted to act at any one time. While establishing a trust with one or more individual trustees may seem like the simplest approach, it…

A discretionary trust is a trust in which the beneficiaries’ rights in relation to the trust assets are limited to the right to be considered by the trustee when the trustee resolves to distribute income or capital. Specifically, the trustee has the full autonomy to distribute all of the income and…

It is a long accepted principle of law that the trustee of a discretionary trust has a wide discretion to determine when and how to make distributions of income or capital to the beneficiaries of the trust. Similarly, since the decision of Katz v Grossman [2005] NSWSC 934 in 2005, the…

One of our previous articles mentioned the need to ‘read the deed’ when key events occur in relation to a trust. In response to feedback we have received, set out below is a list of the key issues we recommend are considered when a trust deed (and any related documents, such…