CONCEALED INTEREST.

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1416, 16 October 1923, Page 5

CONCEALED INTEREST.

PURCHASES BY WIFE OF A TRUSTEE. (By Telegraph. Press Association.) WELLINGTON, Monday. "I do not think that an essential rule of public policy, established to secure the honest and diligent exercise of a trustee's duty with a single eye to the interests of his beneficiaries, should be capable ,of evasion by the simple device of substituting the trustee's wife for himself as the purchaser of a property," said Mr Justice Salmond in the Supreme Court on Saturday. "If there are any purposes for which a husband and wife are still to be treated as one person I think that this is an instance in which the rule should be applied. In the first place, a husband has so direct an interest in the pecuniary advantage of his wife that in the administration of his trust her interests should be regarded as equivalent to his own. In the second place, the special nature of the matrimonial relationship is such as to render all but impracticable any inquiry into the question whether a purchase by the wife of a trustee is not in reality a purchase by the trustee himself in his wife's name, or, at all events, a purchase in which the husband possesses some concealed pecuniary interest."