When will you pay me? Trustee liability and the sale of Gauguin’s Nafea faa ipoipo. 13 April 2022

Topic: When will you pay me? Trustee liability and the sale of Gauguin’s Nafea faa ipoipo (“When will you marry?”)

In 2015, the trustees of Gauguin’s post-impressionist masterpiece Nafea faa ipoipo (“When will you marry?”) sold the piece for $US210M to the Qatari ruling family.

The trustees then spent the next four and a half years in the English High Court and Court of Appeal unsuccessfully resisting paying the broker’s USD10m commission.

This sale of the Gauguin and the litigation that followed provide a fascinating context in which to examine a number of aspects of the exercise of trustee powers and decision making as follows:

• joint trustees’ majority exercise of trust power and binding dissenting trustees;
• trustees’ joint and several personal liability in unjust enrichment;
• trustees’ loss of right of indemnity against the trust estate; and
• the position of outsiders to a trust dealing with individual trustees.

Speaker: Paul Tracey TEP

Paul Tracey has specialised in trust disputes and litigation in London and Jersey (the Channel Islands) for the past twenty years.

He has been called as a barrister in England (of The Middle Temple) and as an advocate of the Royal Court of Jersey. He is also admitted as a solicitor in England and Wales (with Higher Rights of Audience), NSW, Queensland and Victoria.

Paul has LLM degrees from each of the Queensland University of Technology, the University of Queensland and the University of London and has lectured in Equity and Trusts at the University of Sydney.

He is also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and a member of STEP, the Chancery Bar Association and the Singapore Institute of Arbitrators.

He regularly speaks at seminars and conferences, particularly on aspects of contentious trusts work. In particular, he has presented in the past at STEP Asia, at STEP branches in Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney and for the Association of Contentious Trusts and Probate Specialists in London.