As set out in earlier posts, and with thanks to the Television Education Network, today’s post addresses some of the key issues in relation to ‘bespoke’ corporate trustee constitutions’ and trust splitting in a ‘vidcast’ at the following link - https://vimeo.com/145236253
As usual, an edited transcript of the presentation for those that cannot (or choose not) to view it is below –
One of the things that we're spending a lot more time working with is what we loosely call a ‘de facto corporatisation’ or indeed a de facto trust splitting exercise.
In other words, tailoring what would otherwise be a constitution for a shelf company, so as to provide all of the same outcomes that you might otherwise see under a trust split, and embedding those arrangements at least into the company’s constitution, but may be also into the trust instrument itself.
As part of segregating particular assets sitting underneath the trust structure, you can put in place a bespoke or a tailored company constitution, and regulate the way in which directors are appointed to that company, regulate the way in which the shareholders can operate, regulate the way decisions are made in relation to particular assets sitting down inside the trust.
If you actually contractually go and put that into the terms of the constitution, what you can effectively have is, for example, if you're talking about this in an estate planning context, kid 1 controlling part of the trustee company, and giving kid 1 complete autonomy over decisions in relation to assets that are related to that part of the trustee company.
You can then have kid 2 likewise in relation to another control part of the structure and so on.
Alternatively, many people will only look to regulate control in relation to the trustee company.
So they’ll say look, we'll put in place voting requirements, we'll say that one kid has a super vote, or we'll actually appoint an independent board to that company and regulate how those decisions might be made, and this will be an overall strategy for the trust at the trustee company level.