Widow beats freemasons in $200k battle

Wife, 88, wins right to $200k left by husband. Mike Mather reports.

An elderly woman has won a High Court battle against former Freemasons who claimed $200,000 from her late husband’s trust should be bequeathed to the mysterious organisation.

Beatrice White’s late husband Rex set up the trust with former Freemason and Auckland lawyer Bruce McNiece and co-trustee Alexander Davis about 20 years ago. He died in 2001.

Australia-based White, who only learned of the trust after her husband’s death, successfully argued she should receive the funds, not Freemasons NZ.

The application failed after McNiece and Davis were unable to produce documentation proving Rex White wanted the trust’s capital to go to the Freemasons after his wife’s death.

Speaking after the judgment, Hamilton-based lawyer David O’Neill, who represented White, said his client was thrilled by the outcome.

‘‘It was quite taxing on her from a financial and an emotional point of view.

‘‘She is in her late 80s and as you can imagine it is the last thing any of us would want to deal with at that time in our lives.

‘‘However, she felt quite strongly about it, and despite a good deal of The trustees have been shown to have acted inconsistently. trepidation she was very keen to go through with it.’’

White, 88, was too frail to fly to New Zealand for the two-day hearing, however she made an appearance and underwent a crossexamination via audio-visual link from Australia.

O’Neill said the scenario she had faced was rare for New Zealand and he had turned to two Australian decisions to support his legal arguments. The case was likely to have been lesson for all involved, he said. Following the judgment, Freemasons chief executive Laurence Milton said the society was not involved in the case other than as a potential beneficiary.

‘‘I’m not too sure it a casts Freemasons in a bad light.

‘‘It possibly casts one or two lawyers who have not organised their paperwork in a bad light, however.’’

The outcome of the two-day hearing at the High Court in Auckland in May was revealed in a recently released judgement by Justice Paul Davison.

White met her husband in 1962 in New Zealand. The couple later moved to Australia, where they remained.

In the mid 1990s Rex White instructed McNiece – a former fellow Freemason – to establish the family trust, with tax to be paid from the trust’s investments and for quarterly distributions into his wife’s bank account.

In 2014, Beatrice White asked that the trust funds be paid to her, however McNiece said it was Rex White’s intention that his wife receive income from the trust but not the capital, and that when she died, funds held would go to Freemasons NZ.

McNiece and Davis subsequently applied through the High Court for orders that would enforce those alleged wishes.

The order was opposed by Beatrice White and, with no documents to confirm their position, the judge ruled she was entitled to receive all the money in the trust as the sole beneficiary.

‘‘The trustees have been shown to have acted inconsistently and they are unable to demonstrate by reference to either documentation or cogent and reliable evidence, what the objects of the trust that they are trustees of were or are,’’ Justice Davison said.