Pecuniary advantage meaning

Legacy or bequest The expressions ‘legacy’ and ‘bequest’ are ordinarily confined to a sum of money or a personal item, though in some situations they can also denote a gift or devise of land. Furthermore, whether a ‘legacy’ encompasses an annuity turns on the context. Sir William Page Wood VC, in Gaskin v Rogers, explained that where a Will merely uses the word ‘legacy’ and directs a distribution amongst legatees, then, unless the face of the Will shows the testator has departed from the word’s settled legal meaning, annuitants are included. He added that the term ‘pecuniary legatees’ does no more than exclude specific legatees—namely, those entitled to particular chattels—and it does not, prima facie, prevent annuitants receiving the same advantage as they would have enjoyed had the Will spoken simply of ‘legatees’ rather than ‘pecuniary legatees’. All such interpretative rules remain subject to the fundamental principle: determine, from the Will read as a whole, what can be gathered of the testator’s intention where the words employed are not...

Section 6 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA 2002) prescribes the process for making any confiscation order. After the requirements in POCA 2002, s 6(1) and (2) are met, the court is obliged to decide if the offender has a criminal lifestyle. That designation allows the court to infer that the defendant’s wrongdoing is not confined to the conduct proved by the conviction currently before it. In substance, the court proceeds on the basis that the defendant has engaged in other criminal behaviour, leading up to the offence(s) of conviction, which has not been discovered or sanctioned. The criminal lifestyle regime in POCA 2002 takes the form of a statutory test used to decide whether the defendant is to be treated as having a criminal lifestyle, and it frames the assumptions the court may apply during the exercise. For detail on what amounts to a criminal lifestyle under POCA 2002, see Practice Note: Confiscation step 1: Does the defendant have a criminal lifestyle? and Criminal lifestyle—flowchart. Confiscation...