The personal liability of third parties for having received or dealt with trust rights or their traceable substitutes which they received in breach of trust is known as recipient liability. Knowing receipt arises where the recipient has some degree of knowledge that the property was received in breach of the trust or following receipt acquired some degree of knowledge that the rights were trust rights and dealth with them as his/her own instead of returning them to the trust.
In Re Montagu’s Settlement Trusts (1987) Megarry J held that in order to found a claim for knowing receipt, the defendant had to have actual knowledge that his receipt was in breach of trust or was ‘willfully blind’ shutting his eyes to the obvious; or willfully and recklessly failed to make the inquiries that an honest or reasonable persons would make. However, a person was not liable for knowledge he might have once had, but had honestly and genuinely forgotten when the breach had occurred.
Following this was the judgment in BCCI v Ackindele (2000). In this case Nourse J opined that just as Royal Brunei had cleared away the tangled case law of the past to establish from the first, principles the basis on which a person could be liable for assisting a breach of trust, the court could do the same for the law on recipient liability. He held that a defendant would be personally liable only if it would be ‘unconscionable’ for him to retain the benefit of that receipt of trust property. The court recognized that the test in this form could cause difficulties in application but would enable the court to make common sense decisions in commercial contexts where such claims usually arise.
This is perhaps the biggest issue in the law of trusts presently. The ‘unconscionability’ test set down by Norse LJ seems to positively embrace uncertainty. ‘‘Unconscionable’ does not mean anything specifically