Professor John Mee:

What happens is that it happens from the date of the crime but we have to decide whether there was a crime. We do not know whether it happened, but later on, when we decide on the balance of probabilities that this crime happened, we know retrospectively that, at that instant, the severance took place. It states in the Bill that it would only take place in equity, so there would be a kind of trust. A part of my difficulty is that an awful lot of the wording in the Bill is unsatisfactory and unclear, and I wrote 30 pages talking about these very small things, any of which could drag the victim into court, so it has to be got right. The Bill states that the legal and beneficial interest shall stand severed from the moment of the crime and, then, in the next section, it states that there will be a constructive trust, but those two parts do not mean the same thing, so the wording is off. Something happens at the moment of the crime and only later do we know that. To be honest, I do not think this is the way it would be in other jurisdictions but that is how the Bill is at present. At the time of the crime there is a constructive trust but later on we have to prove that the crime happened.