Amid an ongoing dispute among siblings over the administration of their mother’s estate, including allegations of past financial misconduct, a court appointed CIBC Trust as a replacement representative for a deceased woman’s estate.
According to a decision of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, a conflict arose between the children of Shuk Ying Chiu, who died in late 2024, leaving her estate to be divided equally among her five children.
In the years before their mother’s death, one of Chiu’s children — the daughter who was named the executor of her estate — also had a power of attorney from their mother, which was executed in 2015. However, the other siblings alleged that she and her husband mismanaged the mother’s finances between 2017 and 2024, and used some of her money for their benefit.
In 2021, the Public Guardian and Trustee (PGT) provincial agency began an investigation, which found a number of concerns with their financial dealings. And a year later, it was appointed to help oversee Chiu’s personal and financial decisions.
Now, one of Chiu’s other daughters has asked the court to appoint an administrator of the estate — bypassing both the executor and the alternate executor (the spouse of the executor) — due to alleged conflicts of interest. She also requested that the court appoint her, or alternatively, an insolvency firm, McEown and Associates Ltd., to serve as the estate’s representative instead.
The executor opposed the application and argued that there are provisions of provincial estate legislation that provide a better way of addressing her alleged conflicts of interest, without removing her as the estate’s administrator. She also disputed the PGT’s findings and argued that its allegations have not been proven.
Nevertheless, the court concluded that the executor and the alternate executor are both in a serious conflict of interest, as the PGT’s investigations raised a number of issues that could enable the estate to make legal claims against them over the alleged mismanagement of the mother’s finances in the years leading up to her death.
“In order to protect the financial interests of the estate, the executor must investigate each of these claims,” the court said, adding that the executors can’t be expected to investigate their own actions on behalf of the estate.
“The PGT, an independent government agency, has raised concerns with respect to the impugned transactions. In my view, that is sufficient to require the personal representative to investigate them,” the court said.
The court also found that, while there are provisions of the provincial legislation that allow an unhappy beneficiary to pursue a claim on behalf of the estate, this option isn’t necessarily preferable to removing an executor that has a major conflict.
In this case, the unhappy beneficiary has chosen to seek the executor’s removal and the court said, “She is entitled to do so.”
As a result, the court ordered that the executor and alternate executor should be passed over as personal representatives of the estate — however, it declined to appoint the other daughter to that role too.
Given the “high degree of animosity amongst the siblings and the best interests of the estate will be better protected by having an independent party in place,” the court said, in rejecting the idea of appointing her as the substitute for her sister.
The question then was whether to name her choice — an insolvency firm, McEown and Associates Ltd. — as the substitute personal representative, or to chose the option proposed by the executor, CIBC Trust.
Ultimately, the court concluded that CIBC Trust was the better option, as it offered both expertise and greater cost certainty.
The court noted that while McEown proposed to charge the estate for its work on an hourly basis, the trust company proposed to take fixed fees — 4.5% on the first $1 million, 3% on the next $1 million, 2% on the following $2 million, and 1% on anything above the $4-million mark.
And, while there’s no current valuation of the estate, in 2022, it was estimated at $5.5 million — which implied fees of $130,000 from CIBC Trust, the court noted.
“In my view, given the acrimonious history in this family and the consequent high likelihood that … this will be a very time-consuming estate to administer, some certainty on fees is desirable,” the court said. “Given the events of the last several years, if the independent administrator is simply charging an hourly rate without any cap, there is a high risk of the fees spiralling out of control.”
As a result, it opted to appoint CIBC Trust as the substitute representative of the estate.