Joe Zhixiong Zhou v SAIF Partners II L.P. is a recent judgment of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal which concerns a dispute between a private equity fund and its former partner. This judgment, written by Lord Hoffmann NPJ and substantially shorter than those handed down by the lower courts, has several important implications. In this article, we will first unpack and explain the judgment and supplement the discussions with the relevant legal principles and concepts. We will then discuss the judgment’s implications to cases involving a complex web of parties and/or fiduciaries.
Throughout the brief history of proprietary estoppel, it has been rare to find a case where the promisor passed away before the promisee suffers sufficient detriment. Rarer still, to find this promise made jointly by co-owners as tenants-in-common of a property. In Cheung Lai Mui v Cheung Wai Shing [2021], the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal found the “cut-off” point of assessing detriment in such a case to be the death of the last surviving co-owner—but why should it be? This article explores the theoretical interactions between proprietary estoppel, unconscionability and co-ownership in seeking to answer this question.
It is not common to see offshore jurisdictions adopting polarised jurisprudence. The conflict between The X Trusts [2021] SC (Bda) 72 Civ and In the matter of The Piedmont Trust and the Riviera Trust [2021] JRC 248 is such a rare occasion. The dispute concerning whether the scope of a protector’s powers should be wide or narrow had, apart from putting the jurisdictions at a crossroad, also aptly put the protagonist trustee in a contest for screen time with the tritagonist protector. In solving this challenge, we venture to take on a fresh perspective in suggesting that the scope of a protector’s power should be determined by ascertaining the intention of a settlor in light of all the relevant circumstances of a particular trust. Towards the end of this article, we also make some observations for settlors and practitioners from a practical point of view.
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