News and views

On an almost daily basis we read about employment issues that have ended up in litigation, costing those concerned huge sums of money, not to mention ill-feeling and stress. If you’re an employer, it pays to know about your obligations when it comes to hiring, firing and employee relations.

Have you ever been bamboozled when a shop assistant offers you an extended warrant on your latest purchase? Maybe you’ve bought something online that just doesn’t work when it is delivered to your door. Fear not, the law is at work to protect you.

For anyone contemplating a business move, I’d love to tell you it’s a cinch: sign a lease, call in the removers, and ta-da – relocation signed, sealed and delivered. If only.

Getting offices purpose-built for your needs would get anyone excited. For the last 12 months we’ve been advising of our needs, checking off the blueprint, and slowly seeing progress every time we drove past the site; we were there from the start. So when the date arrived that we could finally make the move, it was hard to contain ourselves.

We advisors, who specialise in trusts, had felt for some time the days of assets being cleanly ring-fenced and largely taken out of the equation for rest home subsidy assessments were closing.

Where there is a (last) Will (and testament), there is a way. Without this most crucial of documents, unfortunately, not only is there a no absolutely clear way for settling an Estate, things can get downright wayward.

A residential property was being auctioned in Auckland. The auction stalled at a price of $2.5 million. The vendors had set a reserve of $2.7 million. The auctioneer halted the auction while he asked the vendors whether they would be prepared to reduce the reserve price. The vendors agreed to reduce the reserve price to $2.6 million.