Wednesday 3 February 2010
Chan’s chances of appeal win slim, lawyer says
Tony Chan Chun-chuen’s chances of winning an appeal against a court decision awarding control of Chinachem boss Nina Wang’s multi-billion-dollar estate to a family charitable trust are very slim, according to a senior lawyer who has read the more than 300 pages of judgment.
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Chan’s chances of appeal win slim, lawyer says
Yvonne Tsui
03 February 2010
Tony Chan Chun-chuen’s chances of winning an appeal against a court decision awarding control of Chinachem boss Nina Wang’s multi-billion-dollar estate to a family charitable trust are very slim, according to a senior lawyer who has read the more than 300 pages of judgment.
Barrister Alan Leong Ka-kit SC said yesterday’s decision by Court of First Instance Justice Johnson Lam Man-hon was a well-considered conclusion to the case which left little opportunity for Chan to mount and win an appeal in a higher court.
The Chinachem Charitable Foundation is now able to freely manage Nina Wang Kung Yu-sum’s entire estate, which, according to her brother Dr Kung Yan-sum, amounts to many billion dollars’ worth of assets.
However, one foreseeable obstacle the foundation management may face is an order from the court to freeze the estate until further notice, one of the things Chan must make happen on his journey to appeal.
Leong said the court required Chan to file his grounds of appeal within 28 days and the foundation was, meanwhile, entitled to do as it wished with the estate before any case was heard in the Court of Appeal.
The barrister said Chan could apply to the appeal court to stay the judgment and it would consider whether he had “merits of appeal” and whether the foundation had done anything significant to the estate that was irreversible.
But having read through the judgment, Leong said it would be very difficult to appeal as the judge had applied the right law to test the evidence of the case.
“[Lam] applied the Court of Final Appeal decision in the case of Nina Wang against Wang Din-shin. He started off with the right test on the burden of proof,” Leong said, adding that the judge had also heavily relied on handwriting experts’ evidence and forensic evidence from an electrostatic detection apparatus. That showed that the Wang’s signature on the disputed will [the one presented by Tony Chan] was signed on top of the crease after the document was folded and the judge had found it “unnatural” for Wang to have done so.
Leong said the judge had made a “multi-dimensional judgment” as he had not only relied on forensic evidence but also devoted more than 100 pages to an analysis of the relationship between Chan and Wang. An appeal would be difficult given the appeal court normally was reluctant to substitute its own assessments of factual evidence, he said.
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