When will you pay me? Trustee liability and the sale of Gauguin’s Nafea faa ipoipo 2022 | Society of Trust & Estate Practitioners (STEP) | 12 April 2022 | Web Event

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.

2022 Speaker

Paul Tracey TEP
Fellow, Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and a member of STEP