Monthly Archives: August 2019

The LPP cat that got out of the bag – hear the barristers’ perspectives

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Last week I blogged about the High Court’s recent dismissal of a legal professional privilege claim over some lawyers’ documents mischievously leaked to the media and the tax man.

That blog is immediately below this one but now there is an opportunity to hear more about the case direct from two barristers who appeared for the opposing camps. Walters Kluwer have announced a webinar about Glencore International AG v Commissioner of Taxation [2019] HCA 26 for next Monday, 2 September 2019.

You will be able to stream it live or watch the video for 6 months afterwards. It’s worth a CPD point and it’s free.  Further details here.

High Court refuses to order escaped legal professional privilege cat back into the bag

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Legal professional privilege is a legal immunity but it is not an independent cause of action. So ruled the full bench of the High Court last week in a joint judgment in Glencore International AG v Commissioner of Taxation [2019] HCA 26.

Does the distinction matter?

It was probably crucial for the disappointed plaintiff, vast Swiss-British miner Glencore in its continuing tussle with the Australian Taxation Office.

As you might recall from global media coverage at the time, in 2017 millions of documents were leaked from the Caribbean-based law firm Appleby in an episode that became known as ‘the Paradise Papers.’ Appleby specialises in tax minimisation involving tax havens. Its recent clients include Glencore.

Some of Appleby’s Glencore advice and related documentation leaked its way to the ATO which took a very deep interest in it.

This ATO attention was sufficiently embarrassing for Glencore  to invoke the High Court’s original jurisdiction and seek an injunction against the ATO retaining, relying upon or referring to any of the stolen Appleby documents relating to Glencore.

The High Court noted that there was no issue that the documents stolen from Glencore’s lawyers were  subject to legal professional privilege. But the seven judges unanimously found that this meant only that the documents were exempt from production by court process (eg discovery or subpoena) – it did not necessarily mean that the ATO could be injuncted from using documents which had come into its possession independently of such court processes.

The Court stated [at paras 12 – 13]

Fundamentally [Glencore’s application] rests upon an incorrect premise, namely that legal professional privilege is a legal right which is capable of being enforced, which is to say that it may found a cause of action. The privilege is only an immunity from the exercise of powers which would otherwise compel the disclosure of privileged communications…

It is not sufficient to warrant a new remedy to say that the public interest which supports the privilege is furthered because communications between client and lawyer will be perceived to be even more secure. The development of the law can only proceed from settled principles and be conformable with them. The plaintiffs’ case seeks to do more than that. It seeks to transform the nature of the privilege from an immunity into an ill-defined cause of action which may be brought against anyone with respect to documents which may be in the public domain.

Apart from there not being a cause of action, there was the further difficulty that the cat was already well and truly out of the bag in any event. Para 33:

The relief sought by the plaintiffs points to further difficulties….[including] the fact that the information the subject of the claimed privilege is now in the public domain. In the latter respect the circumstances of this case identify a particular problem were an injunction to be granted. It is that the defendants would be required to assess Australian entities within the Glencore group to income tax on a basis which may be known to bear no real relationship to the true facts.

Ouch. That sounds like there might be a nasty revised tax bill in the pipeline to Glencore.

The Owners Corporation Act – sometimes near enough really is good enough

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If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it really make a sound?

And if an owners corporation sacks its manager without strictly complying with the Owners Corporation Act, has that manager really been terminated? And until that question is resolved is the spurned manager required to hand over the OC’s records and funds to some new manager that the OC claims to have installed as the first manager’s place?

In Jenkins & Ors v OCVM Commercial Pty Ltd [2019] VCAT 1078 the tribunal did not answer the tree question but it did serve up some unwelcome news (and an adverse costs order) to a jilted owners corporation manager in answer to both of the OC questions.

An OC manager had been appointed by a subdivision’s  developer. The manager’s budget was approved at $170,000. The development was then mainly sold off to private lot owners. The new private lot owners quickly became disgruntled with the cost and quality of the OC management services they were receiving and found an alternative manager at almost half the originally-budgeted cost. They voted overwhelmingly to change managers. But the incumbent manager refused to hand over the OC’s records and funds to the new kids.

Was this explained by truculence or a fair reading of the Owners Corporation Act?

At last month’s VCAT hearing, the spurned manager argued that it had never been validly removed by the private lot owners and hence did not have to deliver up the OC’s records and funds to the putative new manager. VCAT’s Member Rowland was never more than tepidly sympathetic in her written reasons published today. True, the sacked manager had been misnamed in the formal ballot removing it. True also, that 86 per cent of the private lot owners who voted unanimously to eject the manager were non-financial at the time of that ballot. (And, yes, that did make the ballot’s quorum problematic.)  And true again, a subsequent special general meeting did not expressly ratify the manager’s removal (although the sentiment was clear enough from related votes at that meeting).

But such non-compliance with formal requirements of the Owners Corporation Act did not necessarily invalidate the OC’s coup against its manager ruled Member Rowland

The nub of the reasoning appears at paras 45 – 47:

I do not consider invalidating every decision made in breach of the [Owners Corporation] Act serves the purpose of [the Owners Corporation Act]….the Act recognizes that a breach may be substantial or trifling. Each breach needs to be examined in its own context to determine what remedy, if any, is fair…. Not every breach will justify a remedy.

Member Rowland concluded that although the OC had not strictly complied with the Owners Corporation Act in removing its manager the breaches were not matters that, of themselves, had caused any prejudice to the manager nor to any private lot owners and that the manager’s removal had subsequently been ratified in any event.

The decision concludes with the observations that –

  • OC managers are bailees of their clients’ records and funds and obliged to deliver them up to those client OCs upon demand;
  • This obligation is not changed by a manager’s view that it has not been validly terminated; and
  • The sacked OC manager had “comprehensively lost the technical arguments” and should pay the costs.

 

The lessons?

Strict compliance with the Owners Corporation Act is always desirable.  But, in reality, sometimes it is also unnecessary.

This is because some breaches of the Owners Corporation Act have no automatic consequences. Moreover, breaches of the Act can often be rescued by subsequent ratification by the OC concerned or by VCAT simply exercising its discretion to take no action about those breaches.

Lawyers typically assess statutory compliance as a binary exercise: did a particular action comply with the applicable legislation or didn’t it? Jenkins is a reminder that the complexities of the Owners Corporation Act call for some additional filters:

  • Does the Owners Corporation Act prescribe any consequences for the particular statutory non-compliance in issue?
  • If not, is there any practical reason why VCAT might exercise its discretion to intervene?

In Aussie Rules footy, infractions are very commonly waived under the ‘advantage rule’, where the umpire’s intervention would unnecessarily interrupt and impede play.  VCAT can exercise a similar discretion to shrug off even clear breaches and call “Play on!”