Vestey Trust can anybody help?

The link is your surname and the trust the government set up at birth under your surname that makes you the debtor your whole life in a trust with them as the administrator of the trust.

 

DG is a lawyer.
Funny thing is all what you are talking about was signed away by Gough Whitlam in 1973 by the Unidroit Treaty of Rome

 

A caveat is not a form of security though, it just notifies the world out there that someone other than the owner has an interest in the property. Doesn't mean it is indefeasible.

 

So?

Are her clients dealing directly with her and getting specific legal advice on their situation?

 

DG Institute refers to an Australian legal precedent: Sharrment Pty Ltd vs The Official Trustee in Bankruptcy. The claim made in court was that the (Vestey style) trust and caveat were taken out for the express purpose of defeating creditors. The court found the action had been taken years prior in "good times" so the trust terms and caveat were upheld. Unfortunately for you this means setting something up now that the default has occurred may not offer the protection you are seeking.

 

That is misleading.

 

I spent several hours in a live webinar yesterday listening to Dominque explain her wealth protection service and, like you, I was very interested in the Vestey Trust approach. What a lot of people in this chat are missing is that the Vestey Trust is not an owner > it is OWED. It is a friendly creditor hence why there is no set up costs, transfer costs or stamp duty. It has no assets. It is simply a mechanism for applying a caveat to your home holding a (friendly) debt equivalent to your equity and cumulative wealth. As creditors are paid in the order to which their agreement is applied to the asset, The Vestey Trust would have to be paid ahead of any creditor that rocks up in the future.

I have questions around the mechanisms for removing the caveat and re-applying it which is how Dominique frees up the asset for sale or amending the caveat terms (debt owed). I don't know who technically owns the trust. Can it be owned by me or does it reside with DGI (which would be a deal breaker). My other thought is, if DGI can do it, why not another lawyer and DGI isn't cheap. Her discounted offer ($7,500) expires in 24 hours but I'm always cautious of people who make a discounted offer that quickly expires and has "only the first 20 people" attached to it. You can usually find the same thing cheaper somewhere else with a bit of research and due diligence. The Sharrmant P/L vs. QLD Brankruptcy court test which DGI holds up as proof they work as an asset protection strategy is over 2 decades old. More questions need to be asked but it's definitely interesting and worth investigating. In short, this is not a trust for asset holding. It is purely a mechanism for applying a caveat to your home with a friendly debt owed which the law empowers to be satisfied in the order to which they were registered (also known as first-in-best-dressed).

 

Pg 18 of this paper by Michael Bennett of Wentworth Chambers on asset protection throws up some questions around the validity of the DGI promise. In short legal there are laws and legal precedent for undoing any attempt to isolate assets from future creditors even where done so years prior. It may be that a Vestey Trust would still serve Dominique's defined purpose but her well advertised goal of doing just that could (put your keyboards down I said COULD!) provide an argument that any Vestey Trust established by DGI is liable to be undone.

https://www.13wentworth.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2014-Hands-off-My-Assets.pdf

 

Firstly there is no such thing as a 'vestey' trust. This is just a marketing term.

A caveat is not really a form of security either. It is notice to the world out there that someone else has a non-legal interest in the property. This interest might be an unregistered mortgage. Having an unregistered mortgage on a property would generally breach the terms of the loan contract a borrowed would have agreed to with a bank as would allowing a caveat.

Caveats lapse automatically in some states.

s37 of the COnveyancing act NSW allows for transactions to defeat creditors to be set aside. There are other state laws on similar terms and there is the commonwealth bankruptcy laws, s120 and s121 in particular, as well.
There is caselaw which says that this includes future creditors. ie. something done when there are no creditors at that point could still be voided.

The sharment case is not case law that this system works.

A gift is not perfected until the gift is actually transferred.

The system is simply the 'gift and borrow back strategy' which has been around for years.

 

Vestey style Trust. Happy now?

 

No. There is no vestey style trust either.

 

I'd have a read of the Sharrment case. You will find it has ZERO connection to what is sold. Here's a simple question. You grant an equitable mortgage to the trust. How much do you owe the trust? What is the amount of the debt? Where is the trust ever put into funds to make a loan? A mortgage is merely a security. If there is no actual loan then the mortgage secures nothing.

 

You will also find zero connection between the cases related to the Paris based trust set up by Lord Vestey and what is sold. The cases relating to Lord Vestey's trust were tax cases - the extent to which income of the trust was liable to tax in the UK. The trust is a plain vanilla discretionary trust.

 

with the current structure sold there is no deed of gift. There used to be - not anymore

 

that offer is made at every seminar that she runs... they are run almost weekly.

 

Grubisa herself suggests that the trust system she brands "Vesty" and MWC, is not impenetrable, but acts to discourage legal action. This may be effective if your debts are small, but legal action may be worthwhile for creditors if your debts/assets are significant. In her Kindle book “Real Estate Rescue”. Grubisa says of MWC “No asset protection system can spruik itself as impenetrable. Having said that, what we are trying to do is make it difficult for creditors to get to you. The more they have to prove, the more expensive it becomes and the more difficult the exercise. They effectively give up when it comes to throwing good money after bad”.

 

But in her seminars makes claims ..." no one's getting through there". "All you equity in property is protected no matter how big it grows...." "I have made it so that it is all protected".

All nonsense and Grubisa is aware when tested it amounts to nothing. No loan, no protection. Will take the regulators shutting her down to get her to stop.

 

If a property has a caveat to a trustee of a trust notifying a purported equitiable mortgage this could be easily removed under a number of scenarios - caveat may have lapsed or it could be shown there was no loan made which the mortgage is supposed to secure.

 

Yes and anyone claiming there to be a loan and seeking to keep money under equitable mortgage when no money actually owing would be committing fraud. When put to the test this has been shown up to be nonsense and DG is aware of that but just continuing to make same baseless claims.