WILLEMSTAD – A long-running international dispute over trust assets held through Curaçao has led the Joint Court of Justice to take extraordinary temporary control measures involving Solid Holding N.V., a Curaçao company whose shares were previously valued at approximately USD 260 million.
The case involves Solid Holding, Cayman Islands-based Britannia National Company Limited, The Solid Fund Private Foundation in Curaçao and trustees of the Lake Cauma Trust in Liechtenstein. It has been before the courts for several years as part of a corporate inquiry proceeding aimed in part at safeguarding trust assets.
The origins of the dispute involve the estate arrangements of a wealthy Israeli businessman who died in 2015. According to court records, he had placed wealth estimated at approximately USD 1 billion into trusts.
One of those structures was the Lake Cauma Trust, a discretionary trust under which trustees were given broad authority over distributions to beneficiaries and other uses of the trust's assets. The beneficiaries included relatives and several museums.
The trust sat at the top of a corporate structure that included Britannia and Curaçao-based Solid Holding.
The Solid shares were valued at approximately USD 260 million, largely reflecting proceeds from Solid's sale of shares in Mobileye N.V. in March 2017. Court documents indicate that the deceased businessman had left instructions concerning how proceeds associated with those shares should eventually be distributed among beneficiaries.
Disagreements over the management and distribution of the assets eventually resulted in extensive litigation.
In March of this year, the Joint Court took the unusual step of appointing former Amsterdam attorney F.D. Stibbe as temporary director of Solid Holding. The Court gave him a decisive vote and the authority to represent the company independently.
The Court also appointed Amsterdam attorney J.R. Berkenbosch as temporary administrator of most of the shares in Solid. That meant voting rights attached to those shares could temporarily be exercised independently of the parties fighting over control.
The Court explained that the measures were intended to facilitate a comprehensive settlement between the parties and protect the assets while the dispute continued. At that stage, the judges explicitly did not make a final determination on whether there had been mismanagement at Solid.
An additional ruling in April clarified that the temporary director held the decisive vote within Solid.
The litigation has a lengthy history. Previous proceedings show that the Court had already imposed restrictions preventing certain distributions and transactions while questions surrounding the trust assets were being resolved. In 2023, the Court rejected requests to loosen some of those restrictions, emphasizing the need to safeguard the assets and ensure that they were ultimately used consistently with the trust arrangements and the deceased's wishes.
The latest development came in September.
On September 17, the Joint Court issued another decision in the same case and relieved both the temporary director and the temporary administrator of the shares of their positions. The published case summary continues to describe the proceedings as an inquiry centered on safeguarding the trust assets.
The available summary of the September ruling does not establish that the Court found wrongdoing by the temporary officials, and their removal should therefore not be interpreted as such.
The dispute illustrates Curaçao's role in complex international corporate and trust structures. Although the underlying family wealth and trust involve parties in several jurisdictions—including the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein—a significant portion of the litigation has taken place before the Joint Court because Solid Holding is incorporated in Curaçao.
The broader corporate inquiry remains significant because of both the size of the assets involved and the Court's repeated intervention to safeguard them while competing claims over their control and eventual distribution are resolved.