Not all beneficiaries or trustee decisions are equal, as William Moffett reports
- Schmidt v Rosewood and Re Londonderry’s Settlement have dominated the principles of trustee’s duties of disclosure to beneficiaries.
- In the case of Lewis v Tamplin, these principles have been revisited.
The modern law of trustees’ duties of disclosure to beneficiaries has been dominated by two cases: Schmidt v Rosewood [2003] 2 AC 709, [2003] 3 All ER 76 (the approach to be taken to disclosure to beneficiaries on demand, and the theory underlying it); and Re Londonderry’s Settlement [1965] Ch 918, [1964] 3 All ER 855 (trustees generally will not be made to disclose the reasons for their decisions).
The scope and application of the principles of those two cases has recently been revisited, and qualified, in the case of Lewis v Tamplin [2018] EWHC 777 (Ch), a decision of His Honour Judge Matthews sitting as a judge of the High Court. The questions that the case raised were said by the judge to be ‘a matter of some practical importance’ on which, in certain respects, ‘there appears to be no existing authority’.
