Multiple Plessings
Tolstoy: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
The Victorian Supreme Court has dismissed an application to restrain a solicitor from acting in a family property dispute, while citing “unease” at the lawyer-client relationship.
The restraint application is the latest in what Justice Michelle Quigley described as a “mounting number of proceedings” between members of the Pless family.
In a VCAT decision handed down late last year, Senior Member Reynah Tang stated that “much like the fictional Oblonsky family, the Pless family has been an unhappy family”.
Their history of litigation began after Peter Pless, acting as executor for the estate of his mother Carmen Rathey, sued his father Roland – who has also since died. He claimed that Mr Pless Snr had siphoned more than $2 million from his late wife’s bank accounts.
The dispute also concerned the family seat in Toorak, and the use of trusts by Pless Snr to protect his properties from the suit. Old Father Pless and his wife owned The Prahran Car Radio Centre Pty Ltd, a radio and air conditioning installation business in Melbourne.
This restraint application was brought by the trustees of two Pless’ property trusts against Jules Marra, a solicitor at SGM Legal. The trustees are defending a claim brought by Anton Pless Bennett, the grandson of Pless Snr.
Their main contention was that Marra was in a position of conflict, as he had previously represented Manuela Rathey (also known as Manuela Pless Bennett), the mother of Anton Pless Bennett.
They claimed that Marra’s allegations in the suit for Pless Bennett were at odds with those he had put forward while representing Ms Rathey previously.
HH accepted that Marra, before agreeing to represent Anton Pless Bennett, warned him of the possibility that he might be put in a position of conflict because of the foregoing reasons, and because Marra had also been called as a witness in related proceedings.
Ultimately, HH decided not to raise the “extreme and unusual power” to restrain, citing the stringent requirement that restraint is to be exercised only where necessary to ensure the proper administration of justice.
However, Quigley J also suggested that Marra’s conduct “closely approaches that mark,” and that another solicitor in Marra’s position may have chosen “a different course.”
She ended the decision by reminding the applicants of the option to raise concerns with the Legal Services Commissioner.
Bennett v Pless Nominees Pty Ltd
Tickling the till
Nigel Duncan: unfit and improper
A former Illawarra lawyer has been struck off the Jam Roll after he was jailed in 2019 for misappropriating over $2.148 million from the trust funds of his clients’ deceased estates.
Nigel Ian Duncan, a solicitor of the firm Maguire & McInerney Lawyers, was sentenced to three years and nine month’s porridge for two counts of dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception.
Duncan was admitted in 1988 and joined Maguire & McInerney in 2010.
Subsequently, the firm received a complaint from a client about Duncan’s handling of her matter. It was discovered that Duncan had helped himself to money held in a client’s estate.
It was dispatched to the Law Society for further probing, where an investigator uncovered more than 120 instances of misappropriation from 23 deceased estates, which occurred over six years.
Nigel had spirited away more than $750,000 of funds from trust accounts for his personal expenses, including mortgage repayments, car leases and tax debts.
He also made fraudulent transfers between accounts, totalling over $1.39 million, in an attempt to cover his tracks.
After Duncan did time, the Law Society applied to the court to have his name expunged from the roll. Julie Ward P, Jeremy Kirk JA and John Basten AJA decided that there was “no doubt” that Duncan could not be seen as a fit and proper type, and promptly derolled him.