COMPLIANCE
Trust deed lost
The trust deed is the foundation of an SMSF and if this pivotal document is lost, there can be significant adverse consequences for the fund, Daniel Butler and Bryce Figot write.
DANIEL BUTLER (pictured) is a director and BRYCE FIGOT specialist counsel at DBA Lawyers.
The court case Mantovani v Vanta Pty Ltd (No 2) [2021] VSC 771 sheds light on the implications of lost trust deeds. Advisers who work with SMSFs or family trusts or any form of trust established by deed should be aware of its implications. In short, due to a lost deed, a family trust was ordered to have failed. The assets of that trust were ordered to be transferred back to the deceased’s estate of the person who had transferred them to the trust over 40 years earlier.
Facts Teresa was the matriarch of the Mantovani family. She had four children, who are now all in their 60s.
40 selfmanagedsuper
Sometime in 1976 a family trust was created with a company called Vanta Pty Ltd acting as trustee. A schedule, which all parties accepted as accurate, stated the settlor was Teresa’s father. Although the schedule was available, no other portion of the deed was available, despite extensive searches. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Teresa transferred several real estate titles to Vanta Pty Ltd as trustee for the family trust. In 2015, Teresa died. All parties agreed the family trust had been created and Vanta Pty Ltd owned the real estate as trustee of the family trust. One of Teresa’s four children, Giovanni, was
