Family behind Jalna yoghurt brand in Victorian Supreme Court over $100 million fortune
A war over a $100m fortune is brewing in the Victorian Supreme Court between the family members of one of Australia’s best-known yoghurt brands, Jalna.
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Exclusive: Members of the family behind one of Australia’s best-known yoghurt brands, Jalna, are at war with each other over a fortune worth more than $100m.
Under attack by some members of the McLaren clan is the management of the family trust by Jalna’s former managing director, Campbell McLaren, and his purchase of a waterfront mansion in Noosa for a record $27m last year.
In Victorian Supreme Court documents, Campbell McLaren’s niece, Candace McLaren, alleges that her uncle was part of a meeting of the company that runs the family trust where it was improperly decided to give him the majority of the $110m reaped from the sale of the family’s two thirds of the Jalna business last year.
Ms McLaren alleges she was wrongly denied payments out of the family trust for the past decade – a period over which it has made profits of more than $54m, according to court documents.
She claims that over the same period Campbell McLaren and companies associated with him received more than $18.8m from the trust, not including the money from the sale of the yoghurt business.
“Campbell is controlling the trustee primarily for his own benefit and not for the benefit of the beneficiaries of the trust,” she said in a statement of claim filed with the court in December.
Ms McLaren declined to comment.
Campbell McLaren’s lawyer, Paul Welling, said his client “does not wish to comment on the matter, other than to say that he is distressed by the allegations, and denies any wrongdoing in respect of the administration of the trust”.
Mr Welling said his client was “hopeful that an agreed resolution of the matter can soon be reached” following the appointment by the Supreme Court of respected former Federal Court judge John Middleton, KC, to wind up the family trust.
Court documents show the stoush has been going on for decades before spilling into the Supreme Court last year and spawning four separate legal cases in which Candace McLaren has sought orders including that the trustee company, Artcam Enterprises, to be removed.
At the core of the bitter battle is the family trust set up by patriarch Bruce McLaren, who died in 2003.
In a bid to resolve the dispute, the parties in April agreed to remove Artcam, which is controlled by Campbell McLaren and his wife, Pam, as trustee of the trust and instead put Mr Middleton in charge of it.
Mr Middleton, who retired in December, is best known for presiding over the Essendon doping saga case in 2014, when he threw out an attempt by the football club and James Hird to stop an investigation by authorities.
Lawyers for Artcam told the Supreme Court that appointing the former judge provided the best chance of heading off “a clear and present danger that the affairs of the trust provide the occasion for litigation between beneficiaries spanning many years”.
Agreeing to appoint Mr Middleton, Justice Jim Delany said there was a need to investigate “past events and conduct which may in the future, or which has already been, called into question, in which Artcam may be said to have been involved”.
Mr Middleton last week applied to the Supreme Court for a ruling on whether one of the McLaren family members, Maria McLaren, and her children, were entitled to distributions from the trust.
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