The Court dismissed interlocutory applications by discretionary beneficiaries joined to a s 92 Trustees Act judicial advice application for production of trust documents from the trustee, a co-trustee of a related trust, and a former director, holding that such wide-ranging document production orders are inappropriate in the summary, non-adversarial context of a judicial advice proceeding. The Court held that parties joined under s 92(2) are not parties in the full sense and cannot use the judicial advice procedure to ventilate contested allegations of breach of trust or fiduciary duty, or to obtain documents to strengthen inferences about underlying disputes that have not been the subject of separate proceedings. The categories of documents sought were also found to be too broad, raising complex issues of privilege and discretionary beneficiary entitlements, and the absence of conferral memoranda was a further barrier.
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