Virtually every jurisdiction is developing private international law rules to deal with trusts and similar ring-fenced structures. With the increasing impact of globalization, business interests throughout the world are intent on maximizing the potential of such structures for raising funds, lowering risks and cutting costs. As a result, numerous complex issues involving the traditional categories of settlor, beneficiary and fiduciary are being radically transformed. This text offers analyses, by 16 authorities in the field, of a broad range of trust-related issues. The many insights in this book reveal the workings of such issues as: the disappearing divergence between common law and civil law jurisdictions in the matter of trusts; using the segregated fund concept to manage the risk of insolvency; the demise of the "amateur trustee" in the charitable trust sector; why loss to the fund supersedes particular losses of beneficiaries; the legal dimensions of hiding ownership by "giving" property to trustees; the intervention of public policy in questions of perpetuity; the selective imposition of OECD and FTF transparency initiatives on offshore jurisdictions; and "policing" of trustee behaviour by beneficiaries. Lawyers, bankers and others dealing with investment and business finance should find much information as well as food for thought in this book, as should those involved in the traditional trust industry, whether as trustees or lawyers or fund managers. Most of the essays in this collection were originally prepared for presentation at a conference held in 2001 at King's College London.

Since the ratification of the Hague Trust Convention by the Netherlands and Italy, the question of whether civil law countries ought to have a trust or a legal institution resembling it has gained importance. The Business and Law Research Centre at the University of Nijmegen founded an international working group of experts in the field of trust law in 1996. This group developed eight principles of European trust law designed to facilitate transactions within European jurisdictions, to enable countries to recognise the potential for the development of new domestic legal concepts and to provide guidance as to how these developments can be framed in different legal and socio-economic contexts. This book provides a detailed analysis of these principles both from a common law and a civil law point of view. In particular, the national reports give an overview of the current law relating to trusts and fiduciary relationships and, in the case of civil law jurisdictions, whether the trust concept can be incorporated in the domestic legal systems on the basis of the eight principles.

This text concerns the development of the trust idea in common and civilian law jurisdictions, whether mainland or offshore. While trusts are important for preserving family wealth and influence, over ninety per cent of the value of trust funds is found in commercial or financial trusts. It is interest in the latter type of trust that is likely to lead to the development of the trust idea in European mainland jurisdictions, especially as the economic destinies of European jurisdictions become increasingly intertwined and as the Hague Convention on the recognition of trusts comes to be implemented. This book should appeal to academic trust lawyers and comparative lawyers, as well as common law and civil law practitioners, whether interested in taking advantage of foreign trust laws, or in developing in their local jurisdictions new ideas obtained from foreign jurisdictions.