Wu v Shen; S.JP (NSW) Pty Ltd v S.JP (Aust) Pty Ltd [2026] NSWSC 1219 | Case summary

Wu v Shen; S.JP (NSW) Pty Ltd v S.JP (Aust) Pty Ltd [2026] NSWSC 1219 | Case summary | Zoe

At a glance

Source facts

Court

Supreme Court of NSW

Decision date

2026-10-02

Before

Free JA

Catchwords

SUCCESSION — probate and administration — informal document — dispensing with formal requirements for execution — Succession Act 2006 (NSW), s 8 — handwritten diary entry — authenticity disputed — allegation of forgery — competing forensic handwriting evidence — whether deceased wrote diary entry — whether document intended to have present testamentary operation notwithstanding contemplation of later formal will — Succession Act 2006 (NSW), s 8 — construction of informal will — reference to “eldest nephew” — latent ambiguity — extrinsic evidence and armchair principle — Succession Act 2006 (NSW), s 32 — gift of “the family trust” — gift to “last person taking care of” deceased — certainty of testamentary gift — held diary entry should be admitted to probate as an informal will — “eldest nephew” referred to deceased’s grandson — “family trust” referred to deceased’s shares in corporate trustee — plaintiff answered description of last person taking care of deceased SUCCESSION — lost will and intestacy — original 2021 will not found — presumption of revocation by destruction — contents of deceased’s filing cabinet removed after death — presumption rebutted — alternatively, if deceased had died intestate, whether plaintiff was deceased’s de facto partner — Succession Act 2006 (NSW), ss 104–105 — Interpretation Act 1987 (NSW), s 21C — held plaintiff and deceased were in a de facto relationship for a continuous period of more than two years up to deceased’s death EQUITY — trusts and trustees — resulting trusts — purchase money trust — purchase of real property through corporate entities — purchase money transferred through bank account of corporate trustee — whether funds became property of family trust or were held on bare trust for deceased — objectively manifested intention — held funds held on bare trust for deceased and later applied at his direction — purchaser intended to take legal and beneficial ownership absolutely — presumption of resulting trust rebutted — claim to property and proceeds dismissed CIVIL PROCEDURE — probate and administration of estates — contentious proceedings — affected person aware of proceedings and potential interest — notice sent by email to person residing overseas — elected not to participate — formal requirements for service of notice dispensed with

Source

Original judgment source is linked above.

Catchwords

SUCCESSION — probate and administration — informal document — dispensing with formal requirements for execution — Succession Act 2006 (NSW), s 8 — handwritten diary entry — authenticity disputed — allegation of forgery — competing forensic handwriting evidence — whether deceased wrote diary entry — whether document intended to have present testamentary operation notwithstanding contemplation of later formal will — Succession Act 2006 (NSW), s 8 — construction of informal will — reference to “eldest nephew” — latent ambiguity — extrinsic evidence and armchair principle — Succession Act 2006 (NSW), s 32 — gift of “the family trust” — gift to “last person taking care of” deceased — certainty of testamentary gift — held diary entry should be admitted to probate as an informal will — “eldest nephew” referred to deceased’s grandson — “family trust” referred to deceased’s shares in corporate trustee — plaintiff answered description of last person taking care of deceased SUCCESSION — lost will and intestacy — original 2021 will not found — presumption of revocation by destruction — contents of deceased’s filing cabinet removed after death — presumption rebutted — alternatively, if deceased had died intestate, whether plaintiff was deceased’s de facto partner — Succession Act 2006 (NSW), ss 104–105 — Interpretation Act 1987 (NSW), s 21C — held plaintiff and deceased were in a de facto relationship for a continuous period of more than two years up to deceased’s death EQUITY — trusts and trustees — resulting trusts — purchase money trust — purchase of real property through corporate entities — purchase money transferred through bank account of corporate trustee — whether funds became property of family trust or were held on bare trust for deceased — objectively manifested intention — held funds held on bare trust for deceased and later applied at his direction — purchaser intended to take legal and beneficial ownership absolutely — presumption of resulting trust rebutted — claim to property and proceeds dismissed CIVIL PROCEDURE — probate and administration of estates — contentious proceedings — affected person aware of proceedings and potential interest — notice sent by email to person residing overseas — elected not to participate — formal requirements for service of notice dispensed with

Judgment

Source: NSW Caselaw (www.caselaw.nsw.gov.au). Converted to plain text by ZoeLaw. Not the official version.

Medium Neutral Citation: Wu v Shen; S.JP (NSW) Pty Ltd v S.JP (Aust) Pty Ltd [2026] NSWSC 1219

Hearing dates: 27 July-11 August, and 13 August 2026

Date of orders: 2 October 2026

Decision date: 02 October 2026

Jurisdiction: Equity

Before: Free JA

Decision: 2023/267995 (Probate proceedings)
(1) Compliance with Pt 78 r 42(1) of the Supreme Court Rules 1970 (NSW) in respect of service of notice on Haijun Zhou is dispensed with.
(2) Declare that the deceased, Jianping Shen, intended that his diary entry for 22 May 2023 (identified in the reasons for judgment as the 2023 Informal Will) would form his will.
(3) The 2023 Informal Will is admitted to probate pursuant to s 8 of the Succession Act 2006 (NSW).
(4) Declare that the plaintiff, Xiaoping (Eva) Wu, was for the purposes of the 2023 Informal Will the last person who took care of the deceased at the time of his death and on that basis is the beneficiary entitled under the 2023 Informal Will to 40% of the assets of the estate (not including shares in SJP (NSW)).
(5) Declare that the second defendant, Gordon Dang, is the person described in the 2023 Informal Will as the “eldest nephew” and on that basis is the beneficiary entitled under the 2023 Informal Will to all of the shares in SJP (NSW) and to 60% of the assets of the estate.
(6) The cross-claim filed by Yun Shen on 5 February 2024 is dismissed.
(7) The parties are to confer about the appropriate person to be granted letters of administration to administer the 2023 Informal Will, and about any further orders required to facilitate such administration.
(8) In the event that the parties cannot, within 14 days of these orders, agree upon the identity of a suitable and available person to be granted letters of administration, the parties are within a further 7 days to file and serve submissions and evidence in respect of their proposed nominations, and any further orders required to facilitate such administration, in which event those issues will be determined by the Court on the papers.
(9) The parties are to confer about the appropriate order to be made as to costs of the Probate Proceedings and the Company Proceedings and the representatives of the plaintiff in the Probate Proceedings are to advise the Court, by email to chambers, within 14 days of judgment of the outcome of that conferral. (10) In the event that the parties do not reach an agreed position on costs, the Court will make directions as to the filing of submissions with a view to determining that issue on the papers. 2023/234995 (Company proceedings) (1) The statement of claim filed on 4 August 2023 is dismissed.

Legislation Cited (10)

Supreme Court Rules 1970(NSW)

Succession Act 2006(NSW)

Interpretation Act 1987(NSW)

Cited:** Civil Procedure Act 2005(NSW)

Evidence Act 1995(NSW)

Family Law Act 1975(Cth)

Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 2005(NSW)

Procedure Act 2005

Relationships Register Act 2010

Law Act 1975

Cases Cited (89)

[2017] NSWSC 1495

[2022] NSWSC 872

Catchwords: SUCCESSION — probate and administration — informal document — dispensing with formal requirements for execution — Succession Act 2006 (NSW), s 8 — handwritten diary entry — authenticity disputed — allegation of forgery — competing forensic handwriting evidence — whether deceased wrote diary entry — whether document intended to have present testamentary operation notwithstanding contemplation of later formal will — Succession Act 2006 (NSW), s 8 — construction of informal will — reference to “eldest nephew” — latent ambiguity — extrinsic evidence and armchair principle — Succession Act 2006 (NSW), s 32 — gift of “the family trust” — gift to “last person taking care of” deceased — certainty of testamentary gift — held diary entry should be admitted to probate as an informal will — “eldest nephew” referred to deceased’s grandson — “family trust” referred to deceased’s shares in corporate trustee — plaintiff answered description of last person taking care of deceased
SUCCESSION — lost will and intestacy — original 2021 will not found — presumption of revocation by destruction — contents of deceased’s filing cabinet removed after death — presumption rebutted — alternatively, if deceased had died intestate, whether plaintiff was deceased’s de facto partner — Succession Act 2006 (NSW), ss 104–105 — Interpretation Act 1987 (NSW), s 21C — held plaintiff and deceased were in a de facto relationship for a continuous period of more than two years up to deceased’s death
EQUITY — trusts and trustees — resulting trusts — purchase money trust — purchase of real property through corporate entities — purchase money transferred through bank account of corporate trustee — whether funds became property of family trust or were held on bare trust for deceased — objectively manifested intention — held funds held on bare trust for deceased and later applied at his direction — purchaser intended to take legal and beneficial ownership absolutely — presumption of resulting trust rebutted — claim to property and proceeds dismissed
CIVIL PROCEDURE — probate and administration of estates — contentious proceedings — affected person aware of proceedings and potential interest — notice sent by email to person residing overseas — elected not to participate — formal requirements for service of notice dispensed with

Cases Cited: Amit Laundry Pty Ltd v Jain [2017] NSWSC 1495
Application by Maggie Riman (Estate of Rita Riman) [2022] NSWSC 872
Bar-Mordecai v Hillston [2004] NSWCA 65
Bear v Bear, Jordan v Bear [2022] NSWSC 1687
Borthwick v Mitchell [2017] NSWSC 1145
Bosanac v Federal Commissioner of Taxation (2022) 275 CLR 37; [2022] HCA 34
Boyes v Cook (1880) 14 Ch D 53
Briginshaw v Briginshaw (1938) 60 CLR 336; [1938] HCA 34
Brown v Gould [1972] Ch 53
Cahill v Rhodes [2002] NSWSC 561
Carrington v Wallace [2019] NSWSC 1301
CGU Insurance Ltd v One.Tel Ltd (in liq) (2010) 242 CLR 174; [2010] HCA 26
Clayton v Clayton [2023] NSWSC 399
Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police v Xin (No 2) [2024] NSWSC 1606
De Lorenzo v De Lorenzo (2020) 104 NSWLR 155; [2020] NSWCA 351
Estate Kouvakas; Lucas v Konakas [2014] NSWSC 786
ET-China.com International Holdings Ltd v Cheung [2021] NSWCA 24; (2021) 388 ALR 128
Fairbairn v Radecki (2022) 275 CLR 400; [2022] HCA 18
Fell v Fell (1922) 31 CLR 268; [1922] HCA 55
Fox v Percy (2003) 214 CLR 118; [2003] HCA 22
Grant v Grant (1870) LR 5 CP 380
Gray v R [2020] NSWCCA 240
Hope v RCA Photophone of Australia Pty Ltd (1937) 59 CLR 348
In the Estate of Knibbs, deceased; Flay v Trueman [1962] 1 WLR 852
Jaksic-Repac v Dundjerski [2025] NSWCA 256
James v Douglas [2016] NSWCA 178
Jones v Robinson [2019] NSWSC 932
King v Perpetual Trustee Co (Ltd) (1955) 94 CLR 70; [1955] HCA 70
Koprivnjak v Koprivnjak [2023] NSWCA 2
Krakowski v Eurolynx Properties Ltd (1995) 183 CLR 563; [1995] HCA 68
Lempens v Reid [2009] SASC 179; (2009) 2 ASTLR 373
Lewis v O’Loughlin (1971) 125 CLR 320; [1971] HCA 53
Li v Ye [2025] NSWCA 227
Lockrey v Ferris [2011] NSWSC 179; (2011) 8 ASTLR 529
Middleton v Schofield [2022] NSWSC 1454
Nock v Austin (1918) 25 CLR 519; [1918] HCA 73
NSW Trustee and Guardian v Payne [2024] NSWSC 1371
Osborne v Smith (1960) 105 CLR 153; [1960] HCA 89
Parry v Haisma [2012] NSWSC 290
Pease v R [2009] NSWCCA 136
Public Trustee of NSW v Herbert [2009] NSWSC 366
R v GW (2016) 258 CLR 108; [2016] HCA 6
RA v R [2007] NSWCCA 251; (2007) 175 A Crim R 221
Re Dimitrijevic; Natoli & Anor v Beleslijin-Darabos & Anor [2022] VSC 198
Re Gulbenkian’s Settlement Trusts [1970] AC 508; [1968] 3 WLR 1127
Re Nicholls [1996] 1 Qd R 179; [1995] QSC 184
Rennes v Death [2003] NSWSC 708
Re Roberts; Repington v Roberts-Gawen (1881) 19 Ch D 520
RnD Funding Pty Ltd v Roncane Pty Ltd [2023] FCAFC 28
Rodny v Weisbord (2020) 102 NSWLR 403; [2020] NSWCA 22
Roggenkamp v Estate of Bowd (unreported, NSWSC, 11 August 1995)
Sadiq v NSW Trustee and Guardian [2015] NSWSC 716
Sadiq v NSW Trustee and Guardian [2016] NSWCA 62
Serwin v Dolso [2020] NSWSC 370
Smith v O’Neill [2014] NSWSC 1119
Smoje v Forrester [2017] NSWCA 308
Stevens v Turner [2018] SASC 7
Tatham v Huxtable (1950) 81 CLR 639; [1950] HCA 56
The Estate of Maureen Alicia Anderton; Edwards v Animal Welfare League [2025] NSWSC 703
Wheatley v Peek [2025] NSWCA 265
Yesilhat v Calokerinos [2021] NSWCA 110

FREE JA: Jianping Shen (Mr Shen) died on 24 May 2023 at the age of 77. At the time of his death, he owned assets of considerable value in Australia and in China, the country of his birth. These proceedings primarily concern the validity of certain alleged wills dealing with the disposition of Mr Shen’s estate. Two sets of proceedings were heard together, on the basis that evidence in each matter is also evidence in the other.
The first set of proceedings, referred to in these reasons as the Probate Proceeding****s, was commenced by the filing of a statement of claim by Ms Xiaoping Wu (also known as Eva Wu) (Ms Wu) in August 2023. Ms Wu contends that she was both the carer and the de facto spouse of Mr Shen at the time of his death, and in the preceding years. The first defendant in the Probate Proceedings is Ms Yun Shen (Ms Shen), who is the only child of Mr Shen. The second defendant, Mr Gordon Dang, is the grandson of Mr Shen and the son of Ms Shen. Without intending any discourtesy to Mr Dang, I will refer to him in this judgment as Gordon or Gordon Dang so as to distinguish him from his father, Mr Lei Dang.
In the Probate Proceedings, Ms Wu seeks an order that a diary entry that she contends was created by Mr Shen on 22 May 2023 (2023 Informal Will) be admitted to probate as an informal will under s 8 of the Succession Act 2006 (NSW) (Succession Act). Ms Wu seeks that letters of administration be granted to her to administer that will. On the terms of the 2023 Informal Will, Mr Shen’s “eldest nephew” is to inherit “the family trust” and 60% of all of Mr Shen’s assets. The “last person taking care of [Mr Shen]” is to inherit 40% of his assets. Ms Wu’s primary contention is that the testamentary disposition of Mr Shen’s assets is governed by the 2023 Informal Will. Ms Wu contends that she is entitled to 40% of the estate pursuant to the 2023 Informal Will, on the basis that she was the last person who took care of Mr Shen before he died.
In the alternative, Ms Wu seeks a grant of probate in respect of a will that she says was made by Mr Shen on 6 October 2021 (2021 Will). On the terms of the 2021 Will, Ms Wu would be entitled to 50% of the real and personal estate of Mr Shen. The remaining 50% would go to Gordon, on the condition that he changes his surname to Shen. Ms Wu is named as the executor in the 2021 Will. A complication affecting that claim is that the original of the 2021 Will has not been found.
In the further alternative in the Probate Proceedings, Ms Wu contends that if neither the 2023 Informal Will nor the 2021 Will is admitted to probate, Mr Shen died intestate. Ms Wu contends that she was the de facto partner of Mr Shen for more than two years before his death, and as such in the event of intestacy she is entitled to all of Mr Shen’s personal effects, a statutory legacy and half of whatever is left of the estate.
In the Probate Proceedings Ms Wu pleaded a claim (in the further alternative to the claims outlined above) for a family provision order under s 59 of the Succession Act*,* together with associated relief concerning the designation of notional estate under Pt 3.3 of the Act. Those claims were not pressed at trial. The fact that a family provision claim was initially pleaded may explain, at least in part, why a considerable amount of the affidavit evidence concerned matters that were ultimately not relevant to the issues the Court was required to determine.
Ms Shen and Gordon Dang resist the claims of Ms Wu in the Probate Proceedings on various grounds. They initially disputed the authenticity of both the 2023 Informal Will and the 2021 Will. By oral closing submissions they effectively conceded that the evidence had established that Mr Shen made the 2021 Will. Ms Shen and Gordon nevertheless rely on the fact that the original of the will has not been found. They say that in the circumstances a rebuttable presumption arises that Mr Shen destroyed the original will with an intention to revoke it.
On the pleadings both Ms Shen and Gordon denied that Ms Wu was either the carer or de facto of Mr Shen. By the time of trial Ms Shen and Gordon did not dispute that Ms Wu was in fact Mr Shen’s carer, or at least was a person who provided care to him. However, they deny that Ms Wu was the de facto spouse of Mr Shen. They also contend that a testamentary gift to the “last person taking care of” Mr Shen fails for uncertainty. On that basis the allocation of 40% of Mr Shen’s estate would fail, according to Ms Shen and Gordon. They submit in the alternative that Ms Wu was not the sole or last carer for Mr Shen in the relevant sense.
Gordon argues in the alternative that if the 2023 Informal Will does govern the testamentary disposition of Mr Shen’s estate then the Court should recognise Gordon as being the intended beneficiary of the 60% allocation of assets under the terms of the will. This is on the basis that “the eldest nephew” should be read as meaning Gordon. As noted above, Gordon was in fact the grandson of Mr Shen. Gordon relies on the similar pronunciation, in Shanghainese, of the words for “eldest nephew” and “eldest grandson”. He also points to WeChat messages sent by Mr Shen in which Mr Shen used “nephew” to describe Gordon.
It was common ground that the individual who was in fact the eldest nephew of Mr Shen (based on a conventional Western understanding of nephew as the son of a sibling) was Haijun Zhou, who now resides in Japan. As explained below, although Haijun Zhou was aware of the proceedings and his potential claim on Mr Shen’s estate, he chose not to participate.
Ms Shen relies on a cross-claim in the Probate Proceedings. The cross-claim builds on the position taken by Ms Shen in her defence. Ms Shen contends that Mr Shen died intestate, Ms Shen was the only child of Mr Shen and Mr Shen had no spouse or de facto spouse at the time of his death. From these premises, Ms Shen contends in the cross-claim that she is entitled to the whole of Mr Shen’s estate on intestacy, pursuant to s 127(1) of the Succession Act. She seeks a declaration to that effect. The cross-claim also seeks, in the alternative, relief concerning the designation of notional estate under Pt 3.3 of the Succession Act. The latter claim was not addressed in submissions at trial.
The second set of proceedings was instituted by statement of claim filed by S.JP (NSW) Pty Ltd (SJP (NSW)) on 4 August 2023 (Company Proceedings). SJP (NSW) is the trustee of a discretionary family trust known as the “S.JP (NSW) Family Trust” (SJP Family Trust). Mr Shen was, until his death, the sole director, secretary and shareholder of SJP (NSW). Ms Shen is a beneficiary of the SJP Family Trust. Mr Shen and Ms Shen’s children (Gordon, Tian Dang and Ai Dang) are also named beneficiaries of the SJP Family Trust under the Trust Deed. Under cl 3.1(e) of the Trust Deed a company incorporated in Australia before the termination date of the Trust Deed is also a beneficiary of the SJP Family Trust if a director or natural person who owns a voting share in that company is a beneficiary of the Trust.
Ms Shen was granted leave on 3 June 2026, to maintain carriage of the Company Proceedings on a derivative basis for SJP (NSW). No issue was agitated at trial about the validity of the Company Proceedings or the capacity of Ms Shen to maintain those proceedings on a derivative basis.
The Company Proceedings concern the beneficial ownership of a strata titled property in an apartment building on Harrington Street in The Rocks (Harrington Street Property). The Harrington Street Property was purchased on 20 September 2022 for $1,930,000 by S.JP (Aust) Pty Ltd (SJP (Australia)). Of the 100 issued shares in SJP (Australia), Ms Wu initially held 80 shares and Mr Shen held the remaining 20 shares. Ms Wu’s contention is that the Harrington Street Property was purchased using funds provided by Mr Shen for Ms Wu in order to provide her with financial security, and to that end Mr Shen intended that it would be owned both legally and beneficially by SJP (Australia), as a company controlled and largely owned by Ms Wu.
SJP (NSW) contends that Mr Shen intended to purchase the Harrington Street Property for Gordon. SJP (NSW) places reliance on the fact that funds for the purchase of the Harrington Street Property were transferred by Mr Shen from a bank account held by SJP (NSW) as trustee for the SJP Family Trust. SJP (NSW) says that when he paid the purchase price Mr Shen intended that the Harrington Street Property would form part of the SJP Family Trust and did not intend that SJP (Australia) would be beneficially entitled to the property. At the same time, SJP (NSW) relies on statements said to indicate that Mr Shen intended the Harrington Street Property to be purchased for Gordon. One of the complications attending this argument is how to reconcile the proposition that Mr Shen intended to buy the property for Gordon with the proposition that he intended for the property to be acquired by SJP (NSW) as trustee for the SJP Family Trust.
SJP (Australia) contends that the transfer of funds via the bank account of SJP (NSW) did not reflect an intention that such funds would be held beneficially by SJP (NSW), whether as trustee for the SJP Family Trust or otherwise. Instead, Mr Shen’s only intention in transferring funds into and out of the SJP (NSW) account was to avoid the risk of Ms Shen freezing his assets in New South Wales. That concern is said to have arisen in the context of ongoing acrimony between Mr Shen and Ms Shen, linked in part to ongoing litigation brought by Mr Shen against Ms Shen and her de facto partner Mr Lei Dang. SJP (Australia) argues that the effect of this arrangement was that for so long as SJP (NSW) held the funds relating to the purchase of the Harrington Street Property it held those funds on trust for Mr Shen, on the basis that the funds could be called upon and released at the direction of Mr Shen. When the funds were, at the direction of Mr Shen, applied to the purchase of the Harrington Street Property that reflected an intention that the property be gifted to Ms Wu (through SJP (Australia) which was in substance her company), so that she could enjoy the benefits of the property and have a source of financial security in the future.
The Harrington Street Property was sold by SJP (Australia) to a third party on 21 July 2023 for $1,800,000. SJP (NSW) contends that prior to that sale the Harrington Street Property was held by SJP (Australia) on resulting trust for SJP (NSW). It says that the proceeds of sale are therefore also held on resulting trust for SJP (NSW). SJP (Australia) contends that it is entitled to retain the benefit of the sale proceeds on the basis that the Harrington Street Property was always intended as a gift to Ms Wu, and the use of a corporate purchaser largely owned and controlled by Ms Wu was an aspect of that intended arrangement. In the alternative, Ms Wu contends that if Mr Shen intended that SJP (NSW) was anything more than just the temporary custodian of the acquisition funds that were transferred to it, then SJP (NSW) held those funds on trust on the terms of the SJP Family Trust, and the use of those funds to purchase the Harrington Street Property was a capital distribution of trust assets to SJP (Australia), which was a beneficiary of the SJP Family Trust.
Ms Wu and SJP (Australia) were represented in both the Probate Proceedings and the Company Proceedings by Ms Sanders of counsel. For ease of reference in these reasons, in describing submissions made by Ms Sanders I refer generally to “Ms Wu”. Given the overlapping factual issues, submissions made by Ms Sanders were in many respects made on behalf of both Ms Wu and SJP (Australia). To that extent where submissions are attributed below to Ms Wu that should be read as including also SJP (Australia). Ms Shen, Gordon and SJP (NSW) were represented in the Probate Proceedings and the Company Proceedings by Mr Morahan of counsel. For ease of reference in these reasons, I refer generally to Ms Shen and Gordon in attributing submissions made by Mr Morahan. To the extent that such submissions were also in substance advanced on behalf of SJP (NSW), those references should be understood as encompassing SJP (NSW) also.

On one of the potential outcomes in the Probate Proceedings, Haijun Zhou stands to inherit 60% of Mr Shen’s estate by virtue of the 2023 Informal Will, as well as the whole of “the family trust” (which would appear to mean ownership of the shares in SJP (NSW)). That gives rise to an issue about whether Haijun Zhou is aware of the proceedings and whether his absence from the proceedings is an impediment to the grant of relief. This issue was raised at the commencement of the hearing. The parties indicated that they were each proceeding on the basis that Haijun Zhou was located in Japan, was aware of the proceedings and had elected not to participate. In those circumstances, no party submitted that there was any insufficiency of notice or defect in the constitution of the proceedings.
The plaintiff read an affidavit of Di (Sabrina) Cai, sworn on 7 August 2026. Ms Cai formerly represented Ms Wu in the Probate Proceedings and SJP (Australia) in the Company Proceedings. Ms Cai spoke to Haijun Zhou on 5 September 2023 (in Mandarin). She confirmed with him that he is the eldest nephew of Mr Shen. In context, I understand this to involve a conventional Western usage, meaning that Mr Zhou is the oldest male child of Mr Shen’s siblings. Ms Cai explained to Mr Zhou the issues arising in the Probate Proceedings, including the possibility that as the eldest nephew he was entitled to inherit the SJP Family Trust and 60% of Mr Shen’s estate. According to Ms Cai, Mr Zhou responded by saying words to the effect of “[t]hat doesn’t sound right. I’m sure my uncle meant Gordon instead [of] me”. Mr Zhou confirmed that he had a good relationship with Mr Shen before his death.
Mr Zhou provided his email address, which was requested by Ms Cai so that she could send copies of various documents in the Probate Proceedings. Later on 5 September 2023 Ms Cai sent an email attaching copies of the statement of claim, the 2021 Will and the 2023 Informal Will. The email stated that Ms Cai would keep Mr Zhou informed of progress with the matter.
On 30 November 2023 Ms Cai again spoke to Haijun Zhou. At that stage she was intending to serve on him a notice of proceedings. Mr Zhou confirmed that he had received the documents sent to him by email in September 2023, but indicated that he did not want to be involved in the court case. He stated that he was busy and ended the call with Ms Cai. On the same day Ms Cai sent a notice of proceedings by email. The email also stated (in English as well as in Chinese characters) that Mr Zhou was being provided with the notice of proceedings because he may have an interest adverse to the plaintiff in the Probate Proceedings.
The notice of proceedings accurately described the issues in the proceedings, including that Mr Zhou may have been bequeathed 60% of Mr Shen’s assets by the 2023 Informal Will. The notice included the following:

The email stated that as Ms Cai did not have an address in Japan to facilitate personal service, she sought confirmation that Mr Zhou would accept service of the notice by email. Mr Zhou did not respond to the email.
Ms Cai made further attempts to speak to Mr Zhou by telephone, without success. She sent further communications by email. On 27 January 2024 she sent a “Notice to Affected Persons”. On 19 June 2025 she sent a letter advising Mr Zhou of an upcoming mediation. Ms Cai received no response from Mr Zhou to any of those communications.
This evidence is sufficient to establish that reasonable steps were taken by the plaintiff in the Probate Proceedings to notify Mr Zhou of the proceedings and the potential impact on his rights. It also establishes that Mr Zhou, having been so notified, has chosen not to take any role in the proceedings.
The notice provided to Mr Zhou served as a notice for the purposes of Pt 78 r 42(1) of the Supreme Court Rules 1970 (NSW) (SCR). It was provided to Mr Zhou as a person whose interests may be affected by the Court’s decision as to the intentions of Mr Shen in relation to an informal testamentary document. In the context of a case like the present involving an application under s 8 of the Succession Act for a grant of probate in respect of an informal testamentary document, a person whose interests may be affected is bound by the Court’s decision to the same extent as if he or she had become a party to the proceedings if a prescribed notice of the proceedings has been served on the person or the Court has, pursuant to r 42(5), dispensed with the requirement for service: Pt 78 r 45 of the SCR. As is implicit in this scheme in the SCR, the fact that such a person has not been joined as a party to the proceedings, despite having an interest in the proceedings, is not itself an impediment to the Court dealing with the matter as constituted. A person who is interested in the outcome of probate proceedings but not joined as a party may nevertheless be bound by the outcome of those proceedings if the person has been notified of the proceedings and given a reasonable opportunity to participate: Osborne v Smith (1960) 105 CLR 153 at 158-159; [1960] HCA 89.
Ms Wu accepts that the documents were not served in the manner required by the rules. The relevant provisions of the Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 2005 (NSW) (UCPR) governing service apply, subject to any inconsistency with the specific provisions of the SCR: ss 10(1) and 11(2) of the Civil Procedure Act 2005 (NSW) (Civil Procedure Act); r 1.5 and Sch 2 of the UCPR. Part 78 of the SCR does not prescribe the mode of service required for the purposes of Pt 78, r 42(1). Rule 10.20(1) of the UCPR provides that a document may be served personally, but personal service is not required unless the rules so require or the Court so orders. There is nothing in either the SCR or the UCPR requiring personal service of a notice in relation to an informal will pursuant to Pt 78, r 42. Service may thus be effected by one of the methods authorised in r 10.5 of the UCPR. Service on an unrepresented party by email, as occurred with Mr Zhou, is not one of the modes of service authorised by r 10.5.
Ms Wu submits that in the circumstances the provision of the notice by email ought be accepted as sufficient service, in circumstances where it is apparent that Mr Zhou received the document. There are a number of means of achieving this outcome, as a matter of substance, under the rules.
Where steps have already been taken by a party for the purpose of bringing a document to the notice of another person the Court may, by order, direct that the document be taken to have been served on that person on a date specified in the order: r 10.14(3) of the UCPR.
The Court may also dispense with compliance with Pt 78 r 42(1) of the SCR: r 42(5)(c) of the SCR. Pursuant to that subrule the Court may dispense with compliance with subrule (1) on the grounds that it would be “expedient to do so (having regard to all the circumstances, including the amount at stake and the degree of difficulty of the point to be determined) so as to save expense”.
Separate from the test of expedience in Pt 78 r 42(5) of the SCR, the Court has a general power under s 14 of the Civil Procedure Act to dispense with any requirement of rules of court if satisfied that it is appropriate to do so in the circumstances of the case.
I am satisfied that, as a matter of substance, the appropriate powers should be exercised to overcome the formal defect in service.
It is appropriate in the circumstances of the present case that the requirement that service be effected under Pt 78 r 42(1) by one of the means of service authorised under the UCPR be dispensed with. The object of service has been achieved, with Mr Zhou becoming aware of the notice regarding the proceedings and the informal will when it was sent to him by email. This would also be a suitable case, if an alternative power were required, to make an order for retrospective recognition of the form of service that occurred, pursuant to r 10.14(3) of the UCPR. That is on the basis that sufficient steps have demonstrably been taken to bring the relevant matters to the attention of Mr Zhou: see Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police v Xin (No 2) [2024] NSWSC 1606 at [48]-[49].
This is sufficient to resolve the issue. If it were necessary to dispense with compliance with Pt 78 r 42(1) by exercise of the Court’s power in r 42(5), I am satisfied that it would be expedient to do so, so as to save expense. The amount at stake in the Probate Proceedings is very large, and Ms Wu has not demonstrated that the additional expense associated with effecting personal service would be substantial, let alone disproportionate having regard to the amount at stake. The more significant point is that Mr Zhou has in fact received notice about the application for recognition of the informal will. I am satisfied that he understands the nature of the claims that are being litigated in the Probate Proceedings and the potential significance to him of the Court’s findings regarding the 2023 Informal Will. The relevant question is therefore whether it would be expedient to save the expense associated with insisting on formal service in circumstances where Mr Zhou has already received the relevant notice by email.
If it were necessary to take this course it would be expedient to dispense with compliance with r 42(1) so as to save that expense. No practical purpose would be served by insisting on the formality of personal service in circumstances where I am satisfied that Mr Zhou appreciates the nature of his connection with the Probate Proceedings and the issues that concern him personally. In Smith v O’Neill [2014] NSWSC 1119 at [28]-[29], Hallen J took into account the fact that affected persons were aware of the proceedings, but had declined to participate, in dispensing with the requirement for service of a prescribed notice under Pt 78 r 42(1) of the SCR.
This approach is consistent with the underlying objects of requiring notice to affected persons in proceedings concerning a grant of probate in solemn form. An interested person ought to be given notice of proceedings and a fair opportunity to intervene. At the same time, it is appropriate that an affected person be bound by the outcome of the proceedings if that person is of full capacity and aware of proceedings, but chooses not to participate: Estate Kouvakas*; Lucas v* Konakas [2014] NSWSC 786 at [258].

The parties identified a number of issues that arise for determination in the two sets of proceedings. With some adaptation to take account of the evolution of argument and the most efficient way of addressing all matters in dispute, I consider that the following issues arise for determination in the Probate Proceedings:
Did Mr Shen make the diary entry on 22 May 2023 (i.e. the 2023 Informal Will)?
If Mr Shen did make the diary entry on 22 May 2023, should that diary entry be admitted to probate pursuant to s 8 of the Succession Act on the basis that it constitutes the last will of Mr Shen?
If the Court admits the 2023 Informal Will to probate, how should the reference to the “eldest nephew” be construed? Is it a reference to Haijun Zhou or Gordon Dang?
If the Court admits the 2023 Informal Will to probate, does the allocation of 40% of the estate to the “last person who cared for” Mr Shen fail for uncertainty? If not, was Ms Wu the last person who cared for Mr Shen?
If the Court does not admit the 2023 Informal Will to probate, should the 2021 Will be admitted to probate, in circumstances where only a copy of the 2021 Will is available? In particular, does the presumption of revocation arise and, if so, has that presumption been rebutted?
If the Court does not admit either the 2023 Informal Will or the 2021 Will to probate, such that Mr Shen died intestate, was Ms Wu the de facto of Mr Shen at the time of Mr Shen’s death?
Should Ms Wu, Ms Shen or some other person be granted letters of administration?
In the Company Proceedings, the following issues arise for determination:
Were the funds held in the bank account of SJP (NSW), and subsequently used to purchase the Harrington Street Property, owned by SJP (NSW) as trustee for the SJP Family Trust? Alternatively, were those funds held on bare trust for Mr Shen personally?
What was Mr Shen’s intention in relation to the purchase of the Harrington Street Property? In particular, did he intend to purchase the property for Ms Wu (through SJP (Australia)), for Gordon or for the SJP Family Trust?
Did SJP (Australia) acquire beneficial as well as legal ownership of the Harrington Street Property on the basis that Mr Shen intended that the Harrington Street Property be gifted to it? Alternatively, did SJP (Australia) take ownership of the Harrington Street Property as a capital distribution from the SJP Family Trust?
Do the proceeds of the sale of the Harrington Street Property form part of Mr Shen’s estate?
My reasons below are organised by reference to these issues. Before addressing those issues, I consider other preliminary matters and set out my findings on matters of general significance.

Subject to the dispute regarding the Harrington Street Property and a background issue about the handling of certain assets in China, there was also no relevant issue requiring determination about the assets comprising Mr Shen’s estate. The parties alluded to potential disputes about the beneficial ownership of some assets. Those disputes may yet need to be considered by the responsible administrator of the estate. The estate of Mr Shen includes, on present indications the following assets in Australia:
a house at XX Queens Road Connells Point (Queens Road House). It has been valued at approximately $4,500,000 - $4,600,000. The interim administrator arranged for the property to be leased after consulting with Ms Wu, Ms Shen and Gordon Dang about selling the property;
a residential unit on West Street, Hurstville, valued at approximately $900,000 - $990,000;
various personal items including electronic devices;
cash held in other Westpac and NAB accounts, amounting to approximately $30,000;
a 2020 Mercedes-Benz G63, valued at approximately $320,000;
a 2013 Mercedes-Benz CLS 350, valued at approximately $26,950-30,700;
20 ordinary shares in S.JP (Aust) Pty Ltd (ACN 661 361 539); and
100 ordinary shares in S.JP (NSW) Pty Ltd (ACN 618 576 042).
At the time of his death Mr Shen had a right of action in Shen v Dang & Ors, Supreme Court Proceedings 2022/00002823 for the repayment of outstanding loans totalling $2,380,000 (plus interest) or in the alternative the transfer of shares proportionate to the interest beneficially owned by him in the property at ## Walton St Blakehurst NSW 2221, along with the repayment of rent received by Mr Lei Dang from an investment property located at ## James St, Blakehurst NSW 2221 which was jointly owned by Mr Shen and Ms Shen. Those proceedings were apparently discontinued by the administrator of Mr Shen’s estate following the receipt of judicial advice.
The assets of the estate in China at the time of Mr Shen’s death apparently included the following (noting that at least some of these assets were subsequently transferred to Ms Shen at her instigation):
beneficial entitlement to 100% of the shares in Shanghai Juncheng Industrial Co Limited. It holds substantial assets, including more than $13 million (AUD) derived from a property compensation payment from the Chinese government. On 6 May 2024, the registration of the ownership of those shares was changed to Ms Shen. This transfer was facilitated by a probate notarization certificate obtained by Ms Shen on 1 August 2023 from the Fengxian District Market Supervision Administration;
beneficial entitlement to a substantial portfolio of listed shares with a value of around $5 million (AUD). By 26 June 2024 all of those shares had been transferred or sold, apparently using the inheritance certificates obtained by Ms Shen. This occurred before the appointment of the interim administrator, who did not receive the funds resulting from these transactions;
substantial cash holdings. Ms Shen gave evidence that between June and September 2023 she caused substantial amounts of money to be transferred to her own accounts from the accounts in China previously held by Mr Shen; and
beneficial ownership of various residential properties in Shanghai and Beijing.
On 4 July 2024 the Court made freezing orders restraining Ms Shen from dealing with any assets in Mr Shen’s name in China, as well as an order requiring Ms Shen to provide an affidavit within 21 days setting out details of all known assets of Mr Shen in China, the value of those assets and details of any transfer of assets. Freezing orders have also been obtained in China by Ms Wu, in respect of various assets in China that were formerly owned by Mr Shen.

As can be seen, Mr Shen owned substantial assets in China, including shares in Chinese companies which are of considerable value. The Court received evidence from Ms Min (Ashley) Chen, a Chinese qualified lawyer since 2010. Ms Chen is the managing partner at Shanghai Founder Law Firm. Since January 2024 she has acted for Ms Wu in relation to matters concerning the estate of Mr Shen in China. Ms Chen gave uncontested evidence about the relevant principles of Chinese law that would impact on the treatment of Mr Shen’s assets inside and outside China. The following propositions were established by her evidence:
if a will made by Mr Shen in Australia is recognised by the Australian courts as a valid will, that will also be recognised by the Chinese Courts as a valid will for the purposes of administration of Mr Shen’s estate and his assets within China. This is on the basis that Australia was the usual place of residence of Mr Shen at the time of his death, as well as the country of his nationality and the place where the will was made;
if a deceased person is found by an Australian court to have died intestate, Chinese laws will apply to immovable assets of the deceased which are located in China. Chinese law would recognise that any Australian law would govern the disposition of any assets of the deceased located in Australia and any movable assets of the deceased located in China; and
Chinese law does not recognise the concept of a “de facto partner” in any intestacy. It follows that a de facto partner is not a recognised inheritor under Chinese law. In the event of an intestacy, that would affect the position of Ms Shen and Ms Wu in terms of the disposition of immovable assets located in China.
The evidence of Ms Chen provides a sufficient basis to be satisfied that these are the principles of Chinese law that would be engaged to the future treatment of the estate’s assets in China. However, none of the parties suggested that this has any direct bearing on the outcome of the Probate Proceedings or the Company Proceedings, to the extent of affecting the relief to be granted or the issues to be determined by the Court. As far as the testamentary disposition of Mr Shen’s estate is concerned, the role of the Court in the Probate Proceedings is confined to determining which will (if any) is operative, the identification of the beneficiaries described in the governing will and the status of Ms Wu under Australian law in the event of intestacy. Neither party sought to contend that any of these matters calls for the application of Chinese law.
The evidence of the interim administrator, Ms Ross-Maranik, which was informed by evidence from Chinese lawyers, also indicated that Chinese law does not recognise the concept of an interim administrator and that Ms Ross-Maranik presently has no standing to make inquiries, redeem assets or administer Mr Shen’s estate within China.

Mr Morahan submitted that there was evidence from other sources indicating that Ms Wu was downplaying her ability to communicate in English. Ms Wu had been involved in litigation in the past in which she appeared for herself and made submissions in English. It was put to her that this demonstrated a high degree of proficiency. Ms Wu was also described as having assisted Mr Shen with documents and forms that were in English. Ms Wu also appears to have had little difficulty interacting socially with various friends and neighbours in English.
I accept, at least in part, the premise of Mr Morahan’s submission. The evidence does indicate that Ms Wu is reasonably proficient in English, which is consistent with Ms Wu’s own description in her affidavit. I do not regard the fact that she nevertheless used an interpreter in giving evidence as a significant matter when assessing her credibility. It is understandable that in the context of a contested hearing in a formal setting a witness may prefer to use the services of an interpreter in their native language, even if the witness might be capable of giving evidence without such services. This is a reasonably common phenomenon. There is some substance to the submission that Ms Wu was defensive on this topic when challenged under cross-examination, and resisted making reasonable concessions about the extent to which she had been able to conduct legal proceedings on her own behalf previously without an interpreter. However, I do not regard this as a weighty consideration when it comes to assessing Ms Wu’s overall credibility. I found that Ms Wu was generally forthcoming in her oral evidence and was doing her best to respond to the questions put to her by counsel.
The second argument advanced by Mr Morahan on this topic was that Ms Wu had concocted evidence to the effect that she gave Mr Shen mooncakes, during the Mooncake Festival period, for a reason that was not the true reason. The first step in the argument is that it is not the usual practice, having regard to cultural conventions in the Chinese community, for persons in a romantic relationship to give mooncakes to each other. Relatedly, Ms Wu gave evidence that in Australia it was not the custom (or at least not her practice) to give Mooncake Festival boxes to friends during the Mooncake Festival. There was evidence that Ms Wu and Mr Shen had given mooncakes to each other. Mr Morahan submitted that this was evidence that Ms Wu was not in a romantic relationship with Mr Shen.
When Ms Wu was asked about why she bought mooncakes for Mr Shen in September 2021:

Mr Morahan suggested that this was a false explanation, which Ms Wu fabricated in the witness box in an attempt to create an excuse for the otherwise damaging evidence that she had bought mooncakes for Mr Shen.
I do not accept this submission. The premise regarding the usual cultural practices concerning the giving of mooncakes within the Chinese community in Australia was not properly established by other evidence. More fundamentally, I find there to be an abundance of evidence from multiple sources which establishes beyond question that Ms Wu and Mr Shen were in a romantic relationship with each other. Indeed, Ms Shen and Gordon ultimately accepted that Ms Wu was in a romantic relationship of some kind with Mr Shen, although they maintained that Ms Wu was overstating the seriousness of the relationship.
In the circumstances, there is no basis to draw the inference sought by Mr Morahan, that the giving of mooncakes was an indication that they were not in a romantic relationship and Ms Wu needed to find an alternative explanation, leading her to concoct the story about the manufacturer’s address. Finally, I consider it highly improbable that Ms Wu would have fabricated such an obscure explanation for purchasing the mooncakes if it was not the true explanation.
The third proposition emphasised by Mr Morahan concerned communications using the WeChat application on the mobile phones of Ms Wu and Mr Shen. The proposition was that Ms Wu had given an inherently improbable account of Mr Shen having accidentally deleted his entire WeChat conversation with Ms Wu shortly before his death. It was submitted that it is highly unlikely that this occurred. Mr Morahan’s submissions referred to the fact that Mr Shen’s phone was in Ms Wu’s possession for almost a year after Mr Shen’s death, so that there was an opportunity for interference with the contents of the phone. It was suggested that deleting a WeChat conversation requires a series of deliberate user actions and confirmations. The last point is problematic given that this was not a matter established by the evidence. Nor was it a matter raised with Ms Wu in cross-examination.
I do not accept that there is a sufficient basis to find that Ms Wu gave false evidence on this issue. There was no evidence of any forensic examination of Mr Shen’s phone, including by the legal representatives of Ms Shen and Gordon, to interrogate the WeChat message history, including to ascertain if and when messages were deleted. Nor was there evidence to demonstrate that, for some reason, this would not have been a fruitful exercise. Nor was any forensic examination sought to be conducted of Ms Wu’s phone, which prima facie would be expected to contain a record of the same WeChat conversation and also, at least potentially, evidence of any deleting activity.
It follows that there is no surrounding objective evidence to support a submission that Ms Wu was giving dishonest evidence about Mr Shen having deleted the conversation. The Court is asked simply to infer that this is such an improbable event that Ms Wu must have been lying in the witness box. That is not an inference that I draw, particularly having regard to the seriousness of the allegation: Briginshaw v Briginshaw (1938) 60 CLR 336, 362; [1938] HCA 34 (Briginshaw).
Mr Morahan draws attention to the fact that Ms Wu did not in any of her affidavits refer to the fact that Mr Shen had deleted the WeChat conversation on his own phone. While that is accurate, I do not accept that it demonstrates that Ms Wu’s explanation was invented in the witness box. Mr Morahan did not demonstrate to my satisfaction that at the time Ms Wu prepared her affidavits there was a live issue as to the authenticity or completeness of the WeChat messages, so as to signify that Ms Wu could reasonably have been expected to proffer an explanation of why Mr Shen’s phone did not contain the same record of the WeChat conversation that was retained on Ms Wu’s phone.
It was suggested in writing that it was not necessary for the Court to make a positive finding that Ms Wu deleted records from Mr Shen’s phone. It was instead said to be sufficient to find that the possibility that relevant messages were deleted has not been excluded. I reject that submission, having regard to the lack of any proper basis being developed in the evidence to doubt the authenticity or completeness of the records that were in evidence, in circumstances where the defendants in the Probate Proceedings had every opportunity to interrogate these matters and to challenge Ms Wu about them.
In written submissions, Ms Shen, Gordon and SJP (NSW) made a number of other criticisms of Ms Wu apparently directed to the question of her credibility. It was submitted that Ms Wu had overstated her grief following Mr Shen’s death. This was said to be demonstrated by the fact that Ms Wu took a number of steps to deal with the Harrington Street Property in the days and weeks following Mr Shen’s death, culminating in the sale of that property at a price which represented a shortfall when compared with the acquisition costs in 2022. These matters were not put to Ms Wu in cross-examination. In any event, I do not consider that the activities referred to reflect adversely on Ms Wu’s credit, whether in relation to her asserted grief or more broadly.
The written submissions also made reference to a version of a certificate issued by the City of Sydney in relation to the Harrington Street Property. It was suggested that a certificate originally issued to SJP (Australia) as the owner of the property had been doctored to give the appearance that it had been issued to SJP (NSW). The document purports to be a notice dated 12 November 2022. There is no evidence indicating that Mr Shen had any involvement with altering the document, or any awareness of its existence. The document sheds no light on the question of what Mr Shen intended when he provided the funds to acquire the Harrington Street Property. Nor is there any proper or fair basis to take these matters into account in assessing the credibility of Ms Wu. Ms Wu was not asked any questions about the document and it was not put to her that she was involved in altering the document. Obviously, that would have been a serious allegation and if any submission was to be advanced connecting Ms Wu and her credibility to this topic it needed to be raised squarely with Ms Wu.
For similar reasons, I reject the proposition that there was some subterfuge concerning the purchase price for the Harrington Street Property, resulting in Ms Wu obtaining $50,000 in circumstances where Mr Shen was under the impression that the Harrington Street Property was to be acquired for $1.98m, when in fact the purchase price was $1.93m. Ms Wu gave affidavit evidence to the contrary and she was not challenged on that evidence in cross-examination.
In writing Mr Morahan submitted that Ms Wu gave materially inconsistent evidence about how often she stayed with Mr Shen. It was also submitted that there were various indirect indications, for example inconsistencies in the recording of addresses in different documents, that inferentially suggested that Ms Wu was spending less time at Mr Shen’s house than she claimed. For example, Mr Shen’s diary was said to reflect a distinction between people who “came” to his house, as opposed to those who resided with him, and that this in turn indicated that Ms Wu did not reside with Mr Shen as often as she claimed.
I do not accept these criticisms. Ms Wu’s evidence was ultimately to the effect that she divided her time between Mr Shen’s house (first in Blakehurst and then at Queens Road, Connells Point) and her mother’s house in Connells Point. This was consistent with the evidence of other witnesses, including her children. As time passed between 2020 and 2023, the proportion of the time Ms Wu spent at Mr Shen’s residence increased. To the extent that there was an absence of precision in this evidence, I regard that as a reflection of a relatively fluid arrangement rather than any material change or inconsistency in Ms Wu’s account. Mr Shen and Ms Wu spoke regularly on the phone, including late at night. I do not accept that there was any inherent improbability or relevant inconsistency in Ms Wu’s evidence, given under cross-examination, that she sometimes spent the night with Mr Shen even after she had also spoken to him by telephone during the night.
My overall conclusion is that Ms Wu was a credible and reliable witness. I accept her evidence as it concerns the nature of her relationship with Mr Shen, as detailed below. In doing so I have not ignored evidence from other sources about that relationship, including evidence that might be said to point to a different conclusion. Taken as a whole, I have found that evidence from alternative sources is consistent in substance with the evidence given by Ms Wu.
Some passing reference was made in submissions to the circumstances in which ownership of a car was transferred after Mr Shen’s death. Ms Wu was not cross-examined on the topic and Mr Morahan expressly disavowed any suggestion that the Court could find that Ms Wu was involved in improperly bringing about the transfer. In the circumstances, nothing turns on that matter.

Ms Shen provided a number of affidavits and was cross-examined. Notwithstanding the volume of that evidence, and putting aside the question of appointment as an administrator of the estate, none of Ms Shen’s evidence was relevant to the issues that were ultimately in dispute. To the extent any challenge to the credibility of Ms Shen as a witness was pressed it is of marginal, if any, relevance. In terms of the manner in which Ms Shen gave her evidence, I did not identify any significant features of her evidence or demeanour that would lead me to doubt that she was endeavouring to provide truthful evidence.
One topic of focus in the submissions of Ms Sanders was the handling by Ms Shen of substantial property and cash in China that was previously held by Mr Shen, but which came to be transferred to Ms Shen after his death, at the instigation of Ms Shen. Ms Wu also relies on the fact that on 10 July 2023 (that is, just over a month and a half after the death of Mr Shen), a signature that was purportedly that of Mr Shen was added to a “Shareholder’s Resolution” of Shanghai Juncheng, appointing Ms Shen as the executive director and legal representative of the company.
Objection was taken to cross-examination on these topics. Ms Sanders sought to justify the cross-examination on the basis that it was directed to the suitability of Ms Shen to act as an administrator of Mr Shen’s estate, in circumstances where Ms Shen was putting herself forward for appointment to administer the estate. I was satisfied that the evidence was relevant to that issue and cross-examination on the topic was allowed to proceed.
There are two overlapping dimensions to this issue. One concerns the honesty and character of Ms Shen, and whether she has demonstrated a tendency to act deceitfully and/or to prefer her own interests over the interests of others with a potential claim on the assets in Mr Shen’s estate. The other concerns the existence of a conflict of interest, because the administrator of Mr Shen’s estate will need to at least consider the possibility of taking action to recover assets from Ms Shen and otherwise investigate the steps apparently taken by Ms Shen or others acting on her behalf, to advance her personal interests.
It is sufficient to focus on the second dimension. As Mr Morahan accepted in closing submissions, it is plain that the administrator of Mr Shen’s estate (whoever that may be) will, at a minimum, have to investigate the transfer since Mr Shen’s death of various Chinese assets that were previously owned by Mr Shen. Given that the assets in question were transferred at Ms Shen’s direction to herself, that would involve an obvious conflict of interest between the interests of the estate and Ms Shen’s personal interests. That is enough to make plain that Ms Shen would not be a suitable person to be appointed to administer Mr Shen’s estate, save possibly for a situation in which she is the sole beneficiary of the estate.
In the circumstances, it is unnecessary to detail or seek to resolve the various factual allegations raised about how Ms Shen dealt with the assets of Mr Shen in China. This occurred after Ms Shen obtained inheritance certificates from various public authorities, also referred to in the evidence as notarisation certificates, to the effect that she was entitled as the inheritor of Mr Shen’s estate to deal with his assets in China. Ms Shen obtained those certificates by representing that Mr Shen had no valid will and that Ms Shen as the child of Mr Shen was his sole heir. As Ms Shen acknowledged in cross-examination, she continued to make representations to that effect to Chinese authorities even when she was aware of the existence of the 2021 Will and the 2023 Informal Will, and the steps being taken by Ms Wu to enforce those wills. Ms Shen also acknowledged that she continued to interact with the Chinese authorities without disclosing that those documents existed or that Ms Wu was asserting that each was a valid will.
Ms Shen has given some explanation of her actions in this regard, to the effect that she did not accept the validity of either alleged will and had received advice that she was entitled to keep relying on the notarisation that she had obtained in China. It was not suggested in the submissions of either party that the Court needs to determine the ultimate rights and wrongs of that approach at the time that it occurred. For the reasons I have given, it is sufficient to conclude that there are questions about what has occurred which will need to be investigated by the administrator of Mr Shen’s estate, which may lead to action being taken to recover assets from Ms Shen.

Tom Ying (Mr Ying) is the principal solicitor at STC Lawyers & Associates (STC Lawyers). He gave evidence concerning the execution of the 2021 Will by Mr Shen. His now wife, Chuchu Yin (Ms Yin) , also gave evidence on that topic. She was an office manager at STC Lawyers as of October 2021. She signed the 2021 Will as a witness to the signature of Mr Shen. Under cross-examination Ms Yin confirmed that she remembered Mr Shen signing the will on 6 October 2021.
In cross-examination, Mr Morahan asked questions that were evidently directed to a potential challenge to the credibility of Mr Ying. One line of questioning focused on the lack of computer records showing the preparation of the 2021 Will. Mr Ying explained that the soft copy records in question had been deleted, but he maintained a hard copy folder which contained the relevant documents, including a copy of the 2021 Will and a letter to Mr Shen outlining his instructions. This was part of a broader attack on the authenticity of the 2021 Will by Ms Shen and Gordon. Written submissions were also advanced in closing on those topics, based on a contention that there were circumstances exciting a suspicion that Mr Shen did not know and approve of the contents of the 2021 Will: Nock v Austin (1918) 25 CLR 519 at 528; [1918] HCA 73. However, in oral address in closing Mr Morahan effectively abandoned any challenge to the authenticity of the 2021 Will. His submissions ultimately proceeded on the basis that the Court would find on the evidence that the copy of the 2021 Will that was in evidence was a copy of an authentic document that was in fact executed by Mr Shen in October 2021 in the offices of STC Lawyers. The issue is instead whether the 2021 Will is now to be presumed to have been revoked.
Given that concession there is no utility in considering the challenge to the credibility of Mr Ying and Ms Yin. Aside from the challenge to the authenticity of the 2021 Will, which has now fallen away, there was no suggestion that the credibility of either Mr Ying nor Ms Yin had any bearing on any other fact in issue.
In any event, no proper basis was established to question the credibility of either witness. The proposition that the 2021 Will was not made by Mr Shen necessarily entails the proposition that both Mr Ying and Ms Yin were involved in the production of false documents (including file notes, the will, the enduring power of attorney and an invoice) and gave false sworn evidence about that document. This is not a situation where it could plausibly be said, on the theory advanced in writing by Ms Shen and Gordon, that Mr Ying and Ms Yin were giving honest but mistaken evidence. Plainly, an allegation of such a grave kind attracts the principles considered in Briginshaw and reflected in s 140 of the Evidence Act 1995 (NSW) (Evidence Act). There is nothing that would justify adverse findings of that kind.
I am satisfied that Mr Ying was a credible and reliable witness. Mr Ying was reluctant to attend Court to give evidence, but acknowledged that he was duty bound to do so. He indicated in his affidavit that he received a threatening text message in October 2023 accusing him of fabricating the 2021 Will and threatening adverse consequences for Mr Ying and his family. While it was apparent that Mr Ying was anxious about his involvement in the matter and about being required to give evidence, I did not perceive this to impair him in such a way as to impact on the content or credibility of his evidence. Mr Ying gave responsive answers to the questions put to him in a manner that did not cause me to have any concerns about his credibility. He relevantly confirmed that the 2021 Will was prepared and executed on 6 October 2021 in his office. He was also absolutely certain that on the same day he recorded the instructions given by Mr Shen and prepared the file note of their conference. I reject the submission made in writing to the extent it has not already been abandoned that Mr Ying’s evidence regarding the loss of computer records and his mode of communication with Mr Shen was implausible and reflected adversely on his credit.
Mr Ying’s evidence is consistent with the invoice that STC Lawyers issued to Mr Shen which referred to work involving “Power of Attorney and Will”. The records show that the invoice was paid on 11 October 2021. As I have observed elsewhere in these reasons, Mr Shen was a meticulous and successful businessman. It is implausible that he paid an invoice for legal services that he had not received.
Ms Yin’s evidence was clear, straightforward and responsive. No reason emerged for doubting her credibility or the reliability of her evidence.
The written submissions for Ms Shen and Gordon make much of the fact that Mr Shen’s diary entry for 6 October 2021 makes reference to other matters, including visiting STC Lawyers to sign the contract to purchase the Queens Road Property, but not the preparation of the 2021 Will. It may be accepted that preparing a will is a significant event and it would have been unsurprising for Mr Shen to have made reference to it in his diary. But it is a very significant logical leap to go from that proposition to a conclusion that the absence of reference proves that no will was prepared, the document apparently signed by Mr Shen must be a forgery and Mr Ying and Ms Yin gave knowingly false evidence. The far more likely inference is that for whatever reason Mr Shen did not record that particular aspect of his visit to STC Lawyers in his diary. Mr Shen’s diary was not a comprehensive record of all of Mr Shen’s activities. I do not accept that the absence of reference to a particular matter in the diary is a reliable basis to infer that it did not occur.
I have no reservations in accepting the evidence of Mr Ying and Ms Yin. That evidence establishes that the copy of the 2021 Will which is in evidence is a copy of a document that was executed by Mr Shen on 6 October 2021. That will and the accompanying documents setting out Mr Shen’s instructions to Mr Ying provide a reliable contemporaneous account of his testamentary intentions. Once the evidence is properly understood, there is no sound reason for suspicion about the 2021 Will. In any event, even if there were circumstances exciting suspicion, Ms Wu has established by clear and satisfactory proof that Mr Shen knew and approved of the contents of the 2021 Will: Nock v Austin at 528.

Ms Sanders explained that the purpose of tendering the medical report was to address, in an anticipatory way, any concerns which might arise about the credibility or reliability of the witness based on her performance under cross-examination. In circumstances where no objection was taken to the tender of the medical report for this purpose, it is unnecessary to consider the legitimacy of this attempt to bolster the credibility and reliability of a witness by way of expert evidence. As events transpired, I have not placed any reliance on the medical report in assessing the credibility or reliability of the evidence of Rongrong Wu.
However, the tender of the medical report gave rise to a separate debate about whether Rongrong Wu lacked capacity to give evidence. Mr Morahan placed particular emphasis on the opinion expressed by Dr Zhang that Mrs Wu was not “suitable” to give evidence. Ms Sanders submitted that the medical report did not provide reason to doubt Mrs Wu’s capacity to give evidence, and at most indicated that she might find the experience of giving evidence to be distressing, which might affect the way in which she gave evidence but not her capacity to do so.
Capacity has a particular meaning under the Evidence Act. Pursuant to s 13(1) of that Act a person is not competent to give evidence about a fact if, for any reason, the person does not have the capacity to understand a question about the fact or the person does not have the capacity to give an answer that can be understood to a question about the fact, and that incapacity cannot be overcome. A person is presumed to be competent unless the contrary is proved: s 13(6). The presumption is displaced if the Court is satisfied on the balance of probabilities that incompetence has been proved: RA v R [2007] NSWCCA 251 at [11]; (2007) 175 A Crim R 221, R v GW (2016) 258 CLR 108; [2016] HCA 6 at [14]. That determination is a “matter of judgment and inevitably includes assessment and impression”: Pease v R [2009] NSWCCA 136 at [11]; cited with approval in Gray v R [2020] NSWCCA 240 at [35].
In Clayton v Clayton [2023] NSWSC 399 at [156]-[164], Meek J reviewed the principles relevant to the assessment of capacity. His Honour’s summary includes the following:

The points made in [162] and [163] resonate here. The medical report provided by Dr Zhang did not establish that Rongrong Wu lacked capacity to give evidence, in the sense defined by s 13 of the Evidence Act. Dr Zhang is a psychiatrist rather than a geriatrician. Although his opinion extended to a conclusion that Mrs Wu was not “suitable” to give evidence, this was not expressed or explained in such a way as to establish that Mrs Wu did not have the capacity to understand questions about factual matters and/or did not have the capacity to give understandable evidence about factual matters. The focus of Dr Zhang’s evidence was the psychological welfare of Rongrong Wu and the prospect that she may find the process of giving evidence to be distressing, to the point of exacerbating her existing psychological conditions. As noted by Meek J in Clayton in the paragraphs quoted above, while a psychological condition such as a major depressive disorder may be relevant to an assessment of capacity, the fact that a person afflicted by such a condition may find it stressful or challenging to give evidence is not itself an indication of incapacity.
I was not satisfied that the medical report of Dr Zhang constituted sufficient evidence to displace the presumption of capacity. However, in circumstances where Ms Shen and Gordon disputed capacity and the medical report did provide at least some reason to doubt capacity, the evidence of Rongrong Wu was initially received on a voir dire for the purposes of assessing her capacity to give evidence.
After Mrs Wu had answered several questions, it was plain that she had no difficulty understanding the questions that were being put to her about matters of fact, albeit through an interpreter. It was equally plain that Mrs Wu had no difficulty expressing herself, again through a Mandarin interpreter, about factual matters in a way that was responsive to the questions and well capable of being understood. Mrs Wu acknowledged in cross-examination that she has had difficulties with her memory, but that did not appear to rise to the level of impeding her from understanding and responding to questions in a coherent way. There were no indications that Mrs Wu found the process of answering questions to be psychologically distressing to the point of suggesting that she was unable to understand or respond to counsel’s questions.
At one point Mrs Wu did become upset and physically agitated, which was indicative of a degree of anxiety and in that sense consistent with the concerns raised by Dr Zhang. After a short adjournment Mrs Wu regained her composure. She proceeded without difficulty to answer questions in a way that confirmed her ability to comprehend the questions and provide answers that were readily understandable. There were some questions during the cross-examination which Mrs Wu was unable to answer because of a stated lack of recollection. However, that did not reach the level of indicating any lack of capacity to understand and answer questions to the extent that she could remember the matters about which she was being asked.
Based on the Court’s assessment of the cross-examination, the voir dire was discontinued and the affidavit and oral evidence of Rongrong Wu (including that given on the initial basis of a voir dire) was received as evidence in the Probate Proceedings and the Company Proceedings. Mr Morahan properly conceded at the point of discontinuing the voir dire that the evidence given by Mrs Wu could be incorporated into evidence in the proceedings.
Mr Morahan did submit in written closing submissions that Mrs Wu was unable to answer a number of questions on the professed basis that she had difficulty recalling matters. This included questions concerning her own medical treatment, the preparation of her affidavit and her interactions with Mr Shen. I accept that there were evident limitations in Mrs Wu’s memory. I do not accept that Mrs Wu was shown to be “strikingly” selective in her memory, by professing certainty on matters that supported her daughter’s case. Given the difficulties with Mrs Wu’s memory, I have approached her evidence with a degree of caution. However, in relevant respects I find her evidence to be consistent with, if not directly corroborated by, other evidence touching on the same issues concerning the relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu and the circumstances surrounding the Harrington Street Property.

Mr Morahan submitted that the Court should place particular reliance on contemporaneous document records as a more reliable source of evidence than witness testimony. They urged particular reliance on the records created by Mr Shen as the best evidence of his intentions and of relevant events and relationships in his life. I agree with this submission, which is consistent with settled principle: ET-China.com International Holdings Ltd v Cheung [2021] NSWCA 24; (2021) 388 ALR 128 (ET-China.com) at [25]-[29]; Fox v Percy (2003) 214 CLR 118; [2003] HCA 22 at [31].
However, I do not accept the proposition which Mr Morahan sought to develop from this premise, namely that the documentary record served to falsify the evidence otherwise relied on by Ms Wu to prove the nature of her relationship with Mr Shen and the relevant events under consideration.
An important source of evidence is the WeChat history of conversations involving Mr Shen. WeChat is a messaging application that is particularly popular in China and in the Chinese community in Australia. Mr Shen engaged in WeChat communications with a number of people and many of those communications were reproduced in evidence.
Mr Morahan submitted that the Court should treat with caution the evidence about Mr Shen’s WeChat communications, in particular the records extracted from Mr Shen’s phone. They drew attention to the fact that Mr Shen’s phone was in the possession of Ms Wu for a period of time after Mr Shen’s death until it was eventually provided to the interim administrator.
I have touched on this topic above in the context of the challenge to Ms Wu’s credibility. I am not persuaded that there is any reason to doubt the authenticity or reliability of the WeChat communications that were in evidence. Ms Wu gave evidence, which I accept, that around February 2023 Mr Shen accidentally deleted the history of his communications with her on WeChat, which would explain the limited records available from his record of the WeChat communications.
In any event, as Mr Morahan accepted, Ms Wu’s phone would be expected to hold its own record of the same history of WeChat messages passing between Mr Shen and Ms Wu. Mr Morahan accepted that the WeChat messages which were in evidence, apparently sourced from Ms Wu’s phone, showing communications between Mr Shen and Ms Wu, were authentic and constituted communications on the dates indicated. It was not put to Ms Wu in cross-examination that she had fabricated content on her phone so as to create the false appearance of communications to and/or from Mr Shen. Nor was that otherwise shown to be a plausible possibility.
The written closing submissions of Mr Morahan did at least flirt with more serious suggestions that messages extracted from Ms Wu’s phone may have been fabricated, or at least should not be relied upon without independent authentication and proof of a complete message history. I reject such submissions, which are not supported by evidence. I take the submission in any event to have been withdrawn by the concessions that Mr Morahan properly made in oral submissions.
Mr Morahan did submit that there may have been other communications in the WeChat history between Mr Shen and Ms Wu which had been deleted or not reproduced in evidence. That is nothing more than speculation. Ms Shen and Gordon apparently did not take any steps to test this theory, for example by seeking to inspect Ms Wu’s phone or require production of her WeChat records or metadata. Although it was put to Ms Wu that she had deleted material from Mr Shen’s phone, it was not put to her that she had deleted relevant messages on her phone that were sent to, or received from, Mr Shen. Nor was it put to her that she otherwise failed to put into evidence other communications that might have shed a different light on the communications that were adduced.
The WeChat messages from Mr Shen provide an important insight into his activities and his attitude to others, in particular Ms Wu, Gordon and Ms Shen, from time to time. While any particular communication needs to be read in context with other available evidence (see ET-China.com at [29]), I do not accept that it is appropriate to reduce the weight accorded to those messages because of the asserted possibility that other communications might once have existed that would shed a different light on the communication. The more appropriate course is rather to proceed on the basis that the evidence that has in fact been adduced is the best record that the parties have been able to muster, with all of the procedural assistance available to them under the UCPR.

Ms Wu was born in China in May 1968. She migrated to Australia around 1989 and became an Australian citizen on 19 September 2013.
Ms Wu first met Mr Shen in about March 2016. At that time she was working at the office of a migration agent in Hurstville. Ms Wu performed administrative services and was not a lawyer. Nevertheless, Mr Shen acquired the habit of referring to her as “Lawyer Wu”.
Later in 2016 Ms Wu began to meet Mr Shen socially for coffee and light meals. In about June 2018 Ms Wu introduced Mr Shen to STC Lawyers, where Ms Wu was then employed as an administrative officer. At that time Mr Shen needed a migration lawyer to help with his application for a spousal visa for his then wife, Ms Guo. Mr Shen later confided in Ms Wu that he was unhappy in his marriage. In December 2018 Ms Guo returned to China.
The contentious questions concern the extent to which Ms Wu went on to become Mr Shen’s romantic partner and carer. According to Ms Wu, the romantic relationship with Mr Shen commenced in February 2019, after Mr Shen had been discharged from Hurstville Private Hospital and Mr Shen told her that he wanted her to be his girlfriend. I address the evidence on this topic in detail below. For the present purpose of setting out the basic chronology of Mr Shen’s life, I focus on relatively uncontentious matters in making the following findings about the evolution of his relationship with Ms Wu.
In 2020 once the COVID pandemic took hold, Ms Wu began to spend more time at Mr Shen’s residence, providing him with care and support. She purchased food and groceries for Mr Shen, drove him to medical appointments, collected his medications, prepared meals, cleaned his home and attended to his laundry.
In around July 2020 Ms Wu reduced her hours at STC Lawyers. From that time she worked only one to one and a half days per week. Her intention was to devote more time to assisting Mr Shen. She told her employer Mr Ying that she had family issues to take care of and she could no longer work fulltime. In about July 2023 she stopped working at STC Lawyers altogether.
In around October 2020 Ms Wu started living at least some of the time with Mr Shen at his house in Blakehurst.
In March 2021 Mr Shen decided that he wished to sell the Blakehurst property. He and Ms Wu together searched for a new property. In early September 2021 they inspected the Queens Road House, which was about 400 metres from the house of Rongrong Wu, Ms Wu’s mother. Mr Shen acquired that property, with settlement occurring on 28 January 2022. Mr Shen moved into the Queens Road House. Ms Wu stayed at the property at least some nights each week.
In early December 2021 Ms Wu accompanied Mr Shen to inspect four cemeteries in Wollongong, Bulli, Berkeley and Woronora Memorial Park in Sutherland. She said that in January 2022 Mr Shen told her that he had settled on Woronora Memorial Park as his preferred burial site because it was closer than Wollongong and easier for Ms Wu to visit (being about 20 minutes’ drive from Connells Point). The transaction did not proceed before Mr Shen’s death. Ms Wu explained that this was because Mr Shen was waiting on an outstanding payment of compensation from the Chinese government. Ms Wu was not challenged on her evidence on this topic, which I accept. It is corroborated by email correspondence that Ms Wu had with staff of Southern Metropolitan Cemeteries between 18 January 2022 and 5 May 2022 regarding inspection of burial sites at Woronora Memorial Park.
Ms Wu subsequently purchased a burial plot in Wollongong’s Nan Tien Temple in June 2023, after Mr Shen’s death.

As noted above, on the topic of the making of the 2021 Will there was, until closing oral address, considerable controversy about what occurred. In oral closing submissions Mr Morahan conceded that the evidence showed that Mr Shen did make the 2021 Will in the offices of STC Lawyers. In any event, I am satisfied that the following facts have been established by the evidence.
As of October 2021, Mr Ying of STC Lawyers had been acting for Mr Shen on a number of matters since his introduction to the firm in July 2018.
Mr Ying is a specialist immigration lawyer and his firm practises primarily in that area. Mr Ying provided immigration law services and some conveyancing services to Mr Shen. Mr Ying was not very experienced in drawing wills for his clients. On his own estimate, he has only prepared wills for existing clients on about five or six occasions.
Mr Ying is fluent in Mandarin and English. He is a native Mandarin speaker and a large proportion of his clients are Chinese.
Mr Ying explained in his evidence both his usual approach to preparing wills and his particular approach to the preparation of the 2021 Will for Mr Shen on 6 October 2021. He did not involve Ms Wu in the preparation of the will. Mr Ying’s account, which I accept, is as follows. Mr Shen explained that he was not feeling good and was concerned about his heart condition. He did not have a will and wanted one. He was concerned about COVID and was unable to get vaccinated because of his heart condition. Although Mr Ying told him that it was his usual practice to prepare a will over two sessions, Mr Shen said that he wanted it done that day. Mr Ying proceeded to take instructions.
Mr Shen explained that Ms Wu was the most fitting person to appoint as executor. He said that she was the only person in Australia who took care of him “day in and day out”. He said that she accompanied him to medical appointments, took care of his daily needs and looked after him when his leg became badly swollen after an accident.
When Mr Shen nominated Ms Wu as a beneficiary this took Mr Ying by surprise and he probed Mr Shen further on the topic. Mr Ying’s exchange with Mr Shen included words to the following effect:

The negative description in cl 5(b) of Mr Shen’s relationship with his daughter was consistent with other statements made by Mr Shen to Mr Ying. Mr Ying gave evidence that Mr Shen often complained to him about his estranged relationship with Ms Shen and his dislike of Lei Dang. Mr Ying said that Mr Shen told him that he was very disappointed with Ms Shen and Lei Dang who were only after him for his money. He said that he had lent money to Lei Dang in the past to run a business which failed, and Lei Dang had never repaid the money.
Mr Morahan drew attention to the fact that there is no reference in Mr Shen’s diary to having made a will on 6 October 2021. That was said to be a peculiar omission, in circumstances where Mr Shen was apparently in the habit of recording important transactions and events, which one would expect to include making a will for the first time.
However, as Mr Morahan ultimately conceded in his closing address, other evidence establishes that Mr Shen did in fact execute the 2021 Will. For whatever reason, he chose not to make reference to that event in his diary entry for 6 October 2021. The observation about Mr Shen’s diary therefore assumes a different significance from that initially urged by Mr Morahan. As this omission illustrates, the diary cannot be treated as a comprehensive account of Mr Shen’s activities on any given day, let alone a comprehensive record of his attitude at any given time to his friends, relatives and acquaintances. The diary is rather a selective account of particular aspects of Mr Shen’s life which he chose to record. There are a large number of entries and it may be accepted that Mr Shen made a large number of records about financial and other transactions that he engaged in. But I do not attach much, if any, weight to the fact that particular people or events are not recorded in Mr Shen’s diary. Where other evidence supports a finding about a particular fact in issue, I do not regard the absence of reference to the same matter in Mr Shen’s diary as a significant factor pointing against such a finding.
Ms Wu has undertaken searches for the original of the 2021 Will. She has been unable to find it. Her belief, based on Mr Shen’s usual practices concerning his important paperwork, is that it would have been kept in Mr Shen’s locked filing cabinet. Mr Shen had from time to time shown Ms Wu items that were in the filing cabinet, including expensive watches and other valuables. He also showed her plastic bags filled with documents and told her that all his important paperwork was kept there including such things as his passport and Chinese national identification. As explained below, the contents of that filing cabinet were removed by Ms Shen, Gordon and Lei Dang after Mr Shen’s death.

The following day, 24 May 2023, Ms Wu was shopping for a further birthday meal that was planned to occur that night at her mother’s house. At around 5pm she was on her way to the Queens Road House (which she had not returned to since dropping off Mr Shen the night before), when she received a call from Tony. He said that he had just found Mr Shen on the floor and he was not moving.
Ms Wu then rushed to Queens Road. After finding Mr Shen unresponsive on the floor she called 000. She performed chest compression and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation under the guidance of emergency staff on the telephone. Paramedics then arrived and after inspecting Mr Shen they informed her that he was deceased.
Tony also contacted Gordon about Mr Shen’s death. According to Gordon, this was at 5.28pm when Gordon was on the train heading home. Gordon told his parents and together they rushed to Queens Road. They arrived at around 6.15pm to 6.30pm (Gordon gives each of these times in different affidavits). By the time they arrived police were present. According to Gordon three police were present. There ensued some confrontational exchanges between Ms Wu, Ms Shen and Gordon. Lei Dang was also present. It appears that a younger female was also present. I infer this was likely Selena Tang, Ms Wu’s daughter. On Gordon’s account, Selena Tang left relatively early in the evening.
Police records show that police were in attendance from approximately 6.30pm. Crime scene investigators attended at about 10.50pm. Ms Wu left the house at around 11.30pm, at which point Ms Shen, Gordon and Lei Dang remained at the house with a police officer.
At some point Ms Shen accessed papers belonging to Mr Shen. On her own account, Ms Shen gathered Mr Shen’s diaries from the house. She says that she did so for safe keeping. She is not specific about the timing. Ms Shen later read Mr Shen’s diary and found the contested entry on the final page for 22 May 2023.
It appears likely that this occurred on the morning of the following day. Gordon’s evidence is that on the morning of 25 May 2023 he, Ms Shen and Lei Dang returned to the Queens Road House and retrieved documents from Mr Shen’s filing cabinet.
Ms Wu returned to Queens Road at a later point on 25 May 2023. There she observed that certain items were no longer there, including one of Mr Shen’s phones and his iPad. She also found that Mr Shen’s filing cabinet, which was ordinarily locked, had been prised open and was empty. Ms Wu described the filing cabinet as the place where Mr Shen kept “all his important paperwork, some valuables and diaries”. Photographs of the empty filing cabinet were in evidence.

I turn now to consider more contentious aspects of the relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu.
As explained above, over the course of proceedings there was a significant shift in the nature and scope of the controversy regarding the relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu. Ms Shen and Gordon initially denied all of the key integers of Ms Wu’s case about the nature of that relationship. By closing submissions they conceded that Ms Wu provided care to Mr Shen prior to his death. There was a remaining contest about whether the “last person who cared for” Mr Shen was a concept that was sufficiently certain to take effect under the 2023 Informal Will and whether it was apt to describe Ms Wu.
As for the romantic aspect of the relationship, Ms Shen and Gordon ultimately conceded that there was a “boyfriend and girlfriend” relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu. They continued to resist, however, the notion that Mr Shen and Ms Wu had a more stable romantic relationship of the kind that made Ms Wu the de facto partner of Mr Shen. They also denied that any such relationship, if it existed at all, existed for long enough before Mr Shen’s death to qualify Ms Wu as his de facto spouse.
Submissions on these topics by Ms Shen and Gordon tended to focus unduly on the extent to which other witnesses did or did not perceive Mr Shen and Ms Wu to be romantic partners, and the particular language that people (including Mr Shen and Ms Wu) chose to use at particular times to refer to each other. For example, Mr Morahan sought to emphasise that Ms Wu used the word “friend” to describe Mr Shen when she spoke to emergency services on the occasion of his death. While evidence of this kind is not wholly irrelevant, in light of the more direct and objective evidence that is available about the nature of the relationship, I approach such evidence with considerable caution. For example, the fact that Ms Wu used the particular word “friend” to describe Mr Shen, when speaking in her non-native language of English in circumstances of great stress, is of little weight compared with direct evidence about how Ms Wu and Mr Shen interacted in the years before his death, particularly when that evidence takes the form of contemporaneous records.

On Ms Wu’s account, her relationship with Mr Shen took on a romantic character from February 2019 after Mr Shen had been in hospital and he told her that he wished her to be his girlfriend. Ms Wu’s evidence was that she agreed to be Mr Shen’s girlfriend and the relationship became a “romantic one”. Although Ms Wu does not give evidence in terms about having had a sexual relationship with Mr Shen, I accept the submission of Ms Sanders that this is implicit in Ms Wu’s description of the romantic character of their relationship, which came to involve Ms Wu regularly sleeping at Mr Shen’s house.
At the time the relationship commenced in 2019, Mr Shen was still married to Ms Guo. Ms Wu gave evidence that when the relationship started it was for that reason “quite casual and discreet”. Ms Wu’s discretion meant that she described Mr Shen initially to her mother and children only as a friend. At that time Ms Wu did not live with Mr Shen at his Blakehurst house but she did visit him frequently, occasionally staying overnight. She estimated that around this time she spent one to two nights per week with Mr Shen at the Blakehurst house. Mr Shen would also visit her at the house of Ms Wu’s mother in Connells Point.
The relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu became more serious over the course of 2020. With the onset of the COVID pandemic Ms Wu spent more time at the Blakehurst house to provide Mr Shen with care and support. She shopped for food, groceries and medical supplies and equipment, drove Mr Shen and accompanied him to medical appointments and the hospital when required, collected medications from pharmacies and cooked and cleaned the house. Part of Ms Wu’s care for Mr Shen involved closely monitoring his intake of medications, which was a daily routine. Ms Wu also assisted Mr Shen with various transactions and activities, including his legal disputes. Mr Shen evidently had a hearty appetite, and Ms Wu gave detailed evidence of his culinary preferences and the shopping and cooking that was involved in satisfying Mr Shen. Ms Wu described herself as caring full time for Mr Shen. I agree with that description of the responsibilities that Ms Wu assumed. It is consistent with the language Mr Shen came to use to describe the level of care and support that Ms Wu provided to him.
In about July 2020 Ms Wu asked her employer at STC Lawyers to reduce her working commitments so that she could have more time to accompany and care for Mr Shen. This was prompted by Mr Shen suggesting that Ms Wu cut down on her hours, recognising the amount of time that she spent looking after him, as well as Ms Wu’s mother.
It was around this time that Mr Shen became estranged from his family as a result of Ms Shen’s decision to reconcile with Lei Dang. Mr Shen expressed to Ms Wu his heartbreak and anger about that situation. He asked her to stay with him and said that no one could understand him but Ms Wu.
From about October 2020 Ms Wu increased the time that she spent residing with Mr Shen at his Blakehurst house. She said that she did so because she was very worried that he needed daily care. Ms Wu was cross-examined on this topic. The effect of her evidence was that she began spending the majority of her time at Mr Shen’s house, while still spending two to three days per week at her mother’s house in Connells Point. That evidence was not entirely consistent with her description in her affidavit of living “full time” at Mr Shen’s house. Ms Wu’s mother suffered from arthritis and high blood pressure and required Ms Wu’s support.
Under cross-examination, when pressed about her account of the evolution of her relationship with Mr Shen, Ms Wu gave the following evidence:

Mr Morahan later submitted that this revealed a change in Ms Wu’s evidence about the time at which the relationship started. I do not accept that characterisation. The relationship plainly progressed over time. There is no inconsistency between Ms Wu stating that the romantic relationship commenced while also specifying “the end of 2020” as the time at which Ms Wu and Mr Shen became “partners and shared a deep emotional bond and lived together”.
Ms Wu proceeded to give evidence that by the end of 2020 she was living with Mr Shen the “majority of the time”, and staying at her mother’s house “two to three days a week”.
In around March 2021 Mr Shen decided that he wished to move to a house closer to Ms Wu’s mother, so as to ease the burden on Ms Wu of moving between the two houses. A further reason that he gave was that he felt unsafe being close to Ms Shen and Lei Dang, who knew the code to access the house. Mr Shen’s desire was to find a new house together and “start a new life”. A few months later Mr Shen and Ms Wu had another discussion in which Mr Shen told Ms Wu that she was all he had in Australia and she must not leave him. He said that he was counting on Ms Wu to take care of him. Shortly afterwards he sent Ms Wu a WeChat message (which was in evidence) about a story involving an elderly man who left only one yuan to his daughter and the balance of his estate to his carer.
After inspecting various properties Mr Shen purchased the Queens Road House in September 2021. He explained to Ms Wu that he would buy the house under his personal name. He said that he was “utterly disappointed” with Ms Shen and he would not buy the house under the SJP Family Trust “for her to have any share in the future”. Shortly after this, Mr Shen told Ms Wu that he had received a message from Ms Shen, via a mutual friend, to the effect that Ms Shen claimed to be entitled to half of Mr Shen’s assets. Mr Shen told Ms Wu that this was “absolutely wrong” and the distribution of his assets would be determined by his will. On 6 September 2021 Mr Shen sent Ms Wu a WeChat message which repeated that his assets would be determined by his own will. He told Ms Wu the next night that she would be in his will and she should trust that he would take care of her.
In April 2021 Mr Shen raised concerns with Ms Wu about his deteriorating health, and said that he wished to give her power to deal with his affairs under an enduring power of attorney. This evidence is corroborated by the steps Mr Shen then took in October 2021 to execute an enduring power of attorney appointing Ms Wu. Although Ms Wu was initially unaware of Mr Shen’s visit to STC Lawyers she signed the enduring power of attorney when Mr Shen presented it to her after his consultation with STC Lawyers.
On 14 October 2021 Mr Shen joined Ms Wu’s family for dinner to celebrate the Double Ninth Festival, a traditional Chinese holiday. Mr Shen told Ms Wu’s mother at the dinner that he promised to take care of Ms Wu. Rongrong Wu said that she was glad that they had found each other as life companions. Thereafter Mr Shen visited Rongrong Wu about once a week.
Settlement of the purchase of the Queens Road House occurred on 28 January 2022. Ms Wu was responsible for packing up the Blakehurst house and moving the contents to Queens Road, where she was also responsible for unpacking. As instructed by Mr Shen, Ms Wu put her own name along with Mr Shen’s on the electricity, gas and internet accounts for the Queens Road House.

There is a substantial body of documentary evidence supporting the conclusion that Mr Shen and Ms Wu were in a stable, long-term, intimate relationship for a number of years up to and including May 2023.
Mr Shen and Ms Wu communicated with each other by WeChat on a regular basis. Relevant messages of a romantic character passing between them include the following:
on 23 June 2021 Mr Shen sent a message to Ms Wu which said “I’m missing you”, followed by an emoji of a kiss. The next day he sent a message to Ms Wu which said “[k]nowing you gives hope to the rest of my life”;
on 27 June 2021 Mr Shen sent Ms Wu an article published by an Australian solicitor about de facto relationships in Australia. According to Ms Wu’s affidavit evidence, after doing so he told Ms Wu that she was his de facto wife in Australia;
on 3 July 2021 Mr Shen sent a WeChat message which said “A woman who receives the care of a man who truly loves her, she will surely have a happy and fulfilling life together”;
on 24 August 2021 Mr Shen sent Ms Wu a WeChat message telling her: “Believe in yourself, you have found a man who takes care of you for a lifetime”;
on Christmas Eve 2021 Mr Shen sent a video to Ms Wu wishing her a happy Christmas, with the words “My Dearest Love”. Ms Wu and her family celebrated Christmas with Mr Shen at his Blakehurst property;
on 29 September 2022 Mr Shen sent Ms Wu a WeChat message relating to the acquisition of the Harrington Street Property. The message (considered in further detail below in that context), thanked Ms Wu for her “care and companionship”. It explained that the Harrington Street Property was a gift for Ms Wu to enjoy in her old age. It ended “Let’s grow old together, I love you 😍🌹❤️”;
on 4 November 2022 Mr Shen sent Ms Wu a WeChat message which said “I cannot express my gratitude in words … I love you 💕!” Two days later he sent a message which said “I really miss🙂 you! But I have too much worries, afraid that I won’t be able to take care of you well for life!”;
on 8 December 2022 Ms Wu asked about the results of a medical examination. Mr Shen said that he dare not tell her “because I am afraid to lose you!”. Ms Wu replied that of course he had to “because we are family”. Later on the same day, after an exchange about various conditions afflicting Mr Shen, Mr Shen said “I will take better care of myself just for you”;
on 11 December 2022 Mr Shen was in Shanghai. He sent a message to Ms Wu which said “After returning to Shanghai for a while, I really miss you!”;
Mr Shen arranged for a gift for Ms Wu at Christmas time in 2022. On Christmas Day Ms Wu sent him a message which said “let’s cherish the time we have together and the beautiful memories. Tony just gave me the gift; thank you. 🙂”;
on 30 December 2022 Mr Shen sent Ms Wu a picture of her with a message that said “The most beautiful night view, the most beautiful woman”. A further message from him read “I miss you!”;
on 21 March 2023 Mr Shen sent a message to Ms Wu which said “Life feels like it’s missing something without you”; and
on 13 May 2023 Mr Shen sent a message to Ms Wu which said “Since knowing me, I have caused you a lot of trouble and distress, and feel very sorry. But in my lifelong memories, I will never forget you”.
On Valentine’s Day 2022 Mr Shen purchased a new Mazda CX-8 for Ms Wu. Mr Shen also routinely provided financial support for Ms Wu in the form of substantial transfers of cash.
Mr Shen communicated with others in terms that demonstrated that he was in a romantic relationship with Ms Wu. He had exchanges on WeChat with childhood friends who were in China. In June 2021 he sent a photograph of Ms Wu to his friend Shanyi Su, who responded to say that if she had a kind heart, living together as companions was fine. In a later message Shanyi Su said that having someone to care for you and look after each other is a good thing. He said “[w]e all hope you can have such a fulfilling life in your later years”.
On 21 July 2021 Mr Shen had a WeChat exchange with another friend, Liu Fengxian, who asked about Ms Wu. Mr Shen said “[s]he will marry no one but me! That’s her!”. When asked how it was that Ms Wu had been able to be with Mr Shen during a lockdown, he replied that “[t]he power of love is irresistible”. In September 2021 they had a further exchange when Mr Shen asked what Liu Fengxian thought of Ms Wu. Liu Fengxian responded approvingly and said that Mr Shen should be kind to Ms Wu and cherish the relationship.
On 31 December 2022 Mr Shen sent his relative Minqiang Xu a photograph of Ms Wu with the message “[m]y girlfriend is a lawyer!”. On 5 February 2023 he sent a further photograph of Ms Wu to Minqiang Xu with the description “Your future sister-in-law, Lawyer Wu!”.
On 22 February 2023 Mr Shen sent a message to a group chat on WeChat comprised of five of his friends in China and Ms Wu. It introduced Ms Wu to that group with a photograph (of himself and Ms Wu) and the following words:

The WeChat messages passing between Mr Shen and Ms Wu refer to various forms of assistance provided by Ms Wu to Mr Shen over a period of years in various aspects of his life. Examples include the following:
Ms Wu assisted Mr Shen in getting a refund on his insurance premiums in June 2021. This is reflected in WeChat messages passing between Mr Shen and Ms Wu at the time;
in June 2021 Ms Wu assisted Mr Shen in discussions with others about the online procedures required for Mr Shen to secure a divorce from his wife. This is reflected in Mr Shen’s diary entry for 16 June 2021;
in June 2021 Ms Wu applied for a passport for Mr Shen. This is referenced in WeChat messages passing between them;
in June 2021 Ms Wu assisted Mr Shen to activate his bank card and explained which card was his Senior Card and which was his bank card;
in November 2021 WeChat messages detail Ms Wu assisting Mr Shen with the sale of his motorcycle. In the same month she organised for a handyman for Mr Shen. A few days later Ms Wu explained to Mr Shen via WeChat the status of his driver licence, after he had lost a number of demerit points; and
in December 2022 Ms Wu arranged for pool compliance works and she also took action to remove ants from Mr Shen’s Range Rover vehicle.
I have set out above references to other WeChat messages that indicate a relationship of intimacy, but which also demonstrate Ms Wu’s activities as Mr Shen’s carer.
There is other documentary evidence to the same effect. Diary entries by Mr Shen from June 2021 onward record Ms Wu assisting him in such ways as buying and delivering to Mr Shen food and cigarettes, helping him to organise and pay for utilities, paying other bills, banking, doing grocery shopping, cleaning, doing and coordinating household repairs and helping him with paperwork relating to various matters including vehicle registration, Mr Shen’s driver licence, litigation, and organising his divorce from Ms Guo. Entries of this kind span the period from June 2021 to Mr Shen’s death in May 2023.
I attach particular weight to the way that Mr Shen described Ms Wu to others. On 22 February 2023 he sent a message to his friends in China on the “Wan Xia Group” on WeChat. It described Ms Wu as taking care of Mr Shen’s “daily life, health and overall well-being”.
On 1 March 2023 Mr Shen sent a WeChat message to Gordon which said the following (with emphasis added):

The Court received evidence from a number of third parties that tends to reinforce the conclusion that in the years before Mr Shen’s death Ms Wu was the person caring for Mr Shen, and that she and Mr Shen had a stable romantic partnership.
I consider first the evidence corroborating the status of Ms Wu as Mr Shen’s carer.
The evidence of third parties relevant to establishing the intimate nature of the relationship, set out below, is also relevant to establishing that Ms Wu took care of Mr Shen on a sustained basis in the years leading up to his death. Plainly, an aspect of the intimate relationship of love and support that existed between Ms Wu and Mr Shen was the provision of substantial care and assistance to Mr Shen by Ms Wu. Mr Shen was an older man with an increasing need for mobility assistance, medical support and domestic care (in particular grocery shopping and cooking). He also had an active commercial life and needed assistance from Ms Wu in understanding English communications. The following additional points emerge from the evidence.
Rongrong Wu described a conversation with Mr Shen in about 2020 in which he lamented his estranged relationship with his daughter, and described Ms Wu as the person who looked after him. He said that Ms Wu helped him with everything, accompanied him to all of his medical appointments and took good care of him at home. Rongrong Wu explained in her evidence that Ms Wu gave similar support to her, helping her with grocery shopping and taking her to doctors.
Dr Michael Baosong Zhu was Mr Shen’s treating general practitioner from 2011 until his death. Dr Zhu gave evidence that in the last few years before Mr Shen’s death Ms Wu accompanied him to medical appointments with Dr Zhu. In the period after April 2022, to the best of Dr Zhu’s recollection, Ms Wu attended all of the appointments (of which there were about ten). She provided physical support to Mr Shen. Ms Wu was introduced to Dr Zhu as his wife. Dr Zhu was pressed in cross-examination about the word used by Mr Shen in Cantonese or Mandarin to describe Ms Wu. Dr Zhu explained that while he could not be sure of the precise word used, the meaning in English is “husband and wife”.
Gordon’s account of meeting Mr Shen in July 2022 at the Telstra shop where Gordon worked, after a prolonged period of them not seeing each other, included that Mr Shen introduced Ms Wu as his lawyer and a person who “takes care of my day-to-day stuff”.
Mr Ying’s evidence concerning the preparation of the 2021 Will touched on Ms Wu’s role in providing care for Mr Shen. Mr Shen explained that Ms Wu was the most fitting person to be appointed as executor because she was the “only person in Australia” who took care of Mr Shen “day in and day out”. Mr Shen described Ms Wu as taking care of his daily needs, including by taking him to doctor appointments, buying groceries and preparing food. He told Mr Ying that Ms Wu was always there for him emotionally and physically and he relied on her very much. These instructions were reflected more formally in the terms of the 2021 Will, which recorded that Mr Shen had carefully considered his bequest to Ms Wu and justified that bequest on the basis that she was very caring and loving to him, and had “for the past years” been looking after his welfare.

The description of Ms Wu as Mr Shen’s “companion” is reflected in the terms of the 2021 Will. It is significant that Mr Shen chose these words to explain his relationship with Ms Wu. I infer that Mr Shen would have appreciated the seriousness and solemnity of the setting, in making his will and answering questions from a lawyer for that purpose. He explained these matters to Mr Ying to reassure him that Mr Shen had sound reasons for wanting Ms Wu to be taken care of after his death. I give particular weight to Mr Shen’s own characterisation of the relationship in this context.
Selena Tang is the daughter of Ms Wu. She is now a practising solicitor. From 2014 until June 2020 she lived with her mother, brother and grandmother (Rongrong Wu) at their house on Connells Point Road. Ms Wu introduced her to Mr Shen as a “good friend” in early 2016. At the end of 2020, after Selena had moved out, she had a conversation with her mother in which Ms Wu said that she now lived with Mr Shen at his Blakehurst house for a few days per week. Ms Wu said that she and Mr Shen genuinely liked each other and were serious about their relationship. Ms Wu said that she needed to be at the Blakehurst house as Mr Shen needed someone to care for him and assist with any day-to-day duties during COVID. Selena described a conversation with Mr Shen during a celebratory lunch on Christmas Day 2021, when Mr Shen told Selena that she could take his furniture if she needed it, as they were like family and he would help Selena and her brother if they needed it.
Around May 2022 Ms Wu told Selena that she had accompanied Mr Shen to a private hospital in Hurstville for a minor heart procedure. Later that month Ms Wu told Selena that she had been living at the Queens Road House with Mr Shen. She explained that he had a lot of health issues such as diabetes and asthma and he needed Ms Wu by his side to take care of him.
Jackson Tang is the son of Ms Wu. Throughout the relevant period he lived at the house on Connells Point Road with his grandmother and, at most times, his mother. Jackson was first introduced to Mr Shen in around 2016, when Jackson was about 18 years old. In the period from 2017 to 2020 he saw Mr Shen a few times at the Connells Point Road house when he returned home late from study or work.
Towards the end of 2020 Jackson was aware that his mother began staying at Mr Shen’s house in Blakehurst a few days a week. Soon after this, Ms Wu told Jackson that she and Mr Shen were “partners” and that they had “been together for a while”. Jackson was challenged in cross-examination on whether he recalled the word “partner” being used. He confirmed his belief that this was the word used.
Jackson Tang described regular interactions that his family had with Mr Shen, including celebratory dinners to mark holidays. Mr Shen was evidently very fond of Jackson and made generous offers to him, including offering his Harley Davidson motorcycle as a gift and allowing Jackson and his sister to drive Mr Shen’s new car.
Rongrong Wu, Ms Wu’s mother, first met Mr Shen in around 2019 when Ms Wu invited him over for dinner. He was at that time introduced to Rongrong Wu as Ms Wu’s “good friend”. In around mid-2020 Rongrong Wu became aware that her daughter and Mr Shen were in a relationship. Ms Wu started spending nights at Mr Shen’s house (then in Blakehurst) a few times a week. Sometimes Mr Shen stayed overnight at Rongrong Wu’s house on Connells Point Road. During one visit to that house Mr Shen told Rongrong Wu (who he referred to as “Teacher Wu”) that he wanted to be Ms Wu’s partner. Rongrong Wu said that Mr Shen had to promise to love her with his true heart, because Ms Wu had not had an easy life and her ex-husband was not a good person. According to Rongrong Wu, Mr Shen’s response was “[o]f course. I will”. In October 2021, during a celebration at the Connells Point Road House to celebrate the Double Ninth Festival, Mr Shen told Rongrong Wu that he intended to leave his assets to Ms Wu when he died, and he promised to take care of her. He made a similar comment to Rongrong Wu in mid-2022 when she visited him at the Queens Road House. At that time he said that he intended to leave his wealth to Ms Wu.
Dr Ban Foo Lau was Mr Shen’s treating cardiologist between 2015 and February 2023. He communicated with Mr Shen in Mandarin. Dr Lau first met Ms Wu in May 2022, when Mr Shen introduced her as “my wife Eva”. Ms Wu accompanied Mr Shen to four of his appointments with Dr Lau in 2022 and 2023. Mr Shen attended the other nine appointments with Dr Lau on his own.
Mr Morahan submitted in writing that the evidence of Dr Lau should be treated with caution because he could not recall the precise Mandarin word used by Mr Shen. I reject that submission. Dr Lau was clear in his evidence about the effect of the word or words used to describe Ms Wu’s relation to Mr Shen. It is unsurprising that Dr Lau was not certain of the precise Mandarin word used, given the passage of time. That does not render his evidence unreliable.
There is no substance to the further point raised in Mr Morahan’s written submissions, which is that Mr Shen is unlikely to have introduced Ms Wu to Dr Lau as “Eva”, given that Mr Shen did not speak English. It is not at all difficult to accept that, however tenuous his grasp of English, Mr Shen knew that Ms Wu, the person with whom (on any view) he had enjoyed an intimate relationship for some time, went by the name “Eva”.
Dr Zhu, Mr Shen’s treating GP, regarded Ms Wu as the spouse of Mr Shen. This was because Mr Shen introduced her as his wife during one of the appointments that they attended together. Ms Wu accompanied Mr Shen to about 10 appointments between April 2022 and May 2023.
Mr Wang knew Ms Wu because she and his wife, Ms Deng were good friends. Mr Wang met Mr Shen for the first time in January 2022. He was introduced by Ms Wu, who described him as her boyfriend. Mr Wang was tested in cross-examination about the word used to describe the relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu. He initially said that “in Chinese we would say that they are in love”. He subsequently agreed that the Mandarin word in question meant that they were “in courtship”. Mr Wang assisted with the move from the Blakehurst property to the Queens Road House. He described Ms Wu as taking charge of directions about the move, including which things were to be disposed of and where things were to be moved to.
The written submissions of Ms Shen and Gordon suggest that little if any weight should be attached to the evidence of Mr Wang because his evidence about the word or words used to describe the relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu had changed. I reject that submission. Particularly taking account of the way in which nuances may be lost in translation, there was no material change in Mr Wang’s evidence as to the nature of the relationship.
It was also submitted that Mr Wang’s account of Mr Shen purchasing jade jewellery from him on the evening of 23 May 2023 was exposed to be inaccurate in a way that reflected adversely on Mr Wang’s credibility. Mr Wang gave evidence that Mr Shen agreed to pay $39,800 for a jade bangle and a jade bracelet. The submission that this was falsified by other evidence was largely premised on a submission that the entry for 23 May 2023 appearing in Mr Shen’s diary – which records Mr Shen paying $39,800 for jade jewellery – was not made by Mr Shen. As explained below, I reject that submission and Ms Lam’s evidence to that effect. Moreover, Mr Shen’s bank records corroborate that he transferred $39,800 to Mr Wang on 23 May 2023. It follows that there is no inconsistency between Mr Wang’s evidence and other evidence.
Ms Deng gave evidence of a similar kind about the relationship between Ms Wu and Mr Shen. She was introduced to Mr Shen by Ms Wu in early 2019 when she saw them having coffee together at a café. Ms Wu introduced Mr Shen as her boyfriend. Ms Wu subsequently spoke to Ms Deng on many occasions about Mr Shen. For example, she described cooking soft food for him because of his bad teeth, and also cooking special soup for him to deal with health conditions. Ms Deng worked for a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner and Ms Wu also asked Ms Deng to acquire Chinese medicine foot-bath packs for her, because foot baths were good for Mr Shen’s circulation. Mr Shen told Ms Deng that Ms Wu treated him well and he was very grateful to have her in his life taking care of him.
When Mr Shen and Ms Wu visited the home of Mr Wang and his wife on the evening of 23 May 2023, Mr Wang observed them sitting very closely together and acting very affectionately towards each other. Mr Shen referred to Ms Wu’s birthday and as noted above he purchased jade jewellery for Ms Wu.
Miro Vlastelica lives on Queens Road, Connells Point in the house next to Mr Shen’s. He became friendly with Mr Shen and Ms Wu when they moved into the Queens Road House around Christmas in 2021. He saw them regularly coming and going from the house. He could also see into the kitchen and dining room of the Queens Road House from his own kitchen. Mr Vlastelica observed Ms Wu cooking and cleaning inside the house, and having meals with Mr Shen. On Mr Vlastelica’s observation, Mr Shen and Ms Wu behaved “just like an ordinary couple”. He observed them to stand very close to each other when he spoke to them. He regularly observed Ms Wu coming and going from the house, and her car was routinely parked in the driveway of the Queens Road House.
Mr Morahan in his written submissions argued that there were significant limitations with the evidence of Mr Vlastelica. He pointed out that Mr Vlastelica does not speak or understand Chinese, so that he could not base his understanding of the relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu on the content of what they said to each other. That is accurate as far as it goes. However, Mr Vlastelica’s evidence about the impressions that he formed regarding the relationship was not based on the words said between them but rather his observations of their behaviour. Mr Morahan submits, and I accept, that there is a temporal limitation on Mr Vlastelica’s evidence. That follows from the fact that they only became neighbours in December 2021.
Guy Wilson was a tenant occupying a property in James Street Blakehurst, which was owned by Mr Shen. From early 2020 Mr Wilson dealt regularly with Mr Shen as his landlord, and he also came to know Ms Wu. Neither Mr Shen nor Ms Wu described their relationship to Mr Wilson but on his assessment of their body language they were intimate with each other. He observed them standing or sitting very closely to each all the time, holding each other’s hands or arms and sometimes touching each other’s shoulders. Mr Wilson agreed that Mr Shen was a generous and affable man. Mr Wilson and Mr Shen became friends and saw each other regularly, including on a few occasions at Mr Shen’s house in Blakehurst. Mr Wilson described Ms Wu as behaving like the “lady of the house” at Blakehurst, which included greeting and farewelling visitors and performing domestic duties.
Mr Morahan submits that Mr Wilson’s evidence should be given only limited weight, given that it was impressionistic and based on relatively limited observations, and because Mr Wilson does not speak or understand Chinese. Again, these submissions are accurate as far as they go. Plainly Mr Wilson’s evidence is not sufficient to establish on its own the nature of the relationship that existed between Mr Shen and Ms Wu, including how long that relationship endured. But it is nevertheless a relevant contribution to the overall mosaic of evidence. I have relied on the evidence in that way.
Leilani Rubin-Tasic lived with her family at a house on Connells Point Road, Connells Point between 2011 and August 2023. From around 2014 Ms Wu lived at the neighbouring property with her children and her mother Rongrong Wu. Ms Rubin-Tasic first became aware of Mr Shen in around 2022 when she saw him and Ms Wu coming in and out of the house on Connells Point Road. She observed them to be quite intimate together, with Ms Wu always holding onto Mr Shen’s arm. Between January 2021 and May 2023 Ms Rubin-Tasic worked at a local café, which was visited by Mr Shen and Ms Wu at least once every fortnight. She observed them holding hands and sitting very close to each other. Ms Wu always ordered for both of them.
Ms Rubin-Tasic’s mother, Tania Rubin, also gave evidence. She and Ms Wu were close and spoke regularly. Ms Rubin recalled first seeing Mr Shen before the COVID pandemic. She observed Ms Wu and Mr Shen to be physically very close to each other, and holding each other’s arms. Ms Wu introduced Mr Shen as her boyfriend. After that time she observed Mr Shen and Ms Wu going in or out of the house on Connells Point Road a few times each week. Around January 2022 Ms Wu told Ms Rubin that Mr Shen had purchased the Queens Road House because it was very close to Ms Wu’s mother’s house. Ms Wu said that she would be moving in with him, and that the proximity of the houses would help as she needed to care for both Mr Shen and her mother. Ms Rubin assisted with the move by letting Ms Wu and Mr Shen store belongings in her garage. Mr Shen and Ms Wu continued to visit the house on Connells Point Road regularly. In around October 2022 Mr Shen expressed an interest in buying Ms Rubin’s house, because he was considering buying another house closer to the house of Ms Wu’s mother.
Qiang (John) Li (Mr Li) is a handyman who performed services for Mr Shen, beginning at Mr Shen’s Blakehurst home in around 2018 or 2019. As appears to have been typical of many of the people who entered Mr Shen’s orbit, Mr Li became a friend of Mr Shen and a beneficiary of his support and camaraderie. Mr Li visited the Blakehurst house at least once a month and he came to see Mr Shen as like an older brother. Mr Li gave evidence that Ms Wu was at the Blakehurst house most of the time when Mr Li visited. He observed Ms Wu and Mr Shen sitting very close to each other whenever they sat, and Mr Shen spoke to her in an affectionate tone. Mr Li asked Mr Shen if Ms Wu was his girlfriend and he said yes. Mr Li also asked on another occasion why Mr Shen was not married to Ms Wu. He responded that marriage was too complicated and if he married someone he would face complications from his family back in Jinshan, China.
In around January 2022 Mr Li assisted with the move from the Blakehurst House to the new Queens Road House. Ms Wu, her son Jackson Tang and Jackson’s girlfriend moved items into the house. After the move Mr Li had a conversation with Mr Shen about the suitability of the house for him, because Mr Li was concerned about Mr Shen’s mobility. Mr Shen’s response included that he had bought the house because it was very close to the house of Ms Wu’s mother. Mr Li visited the house at Queens Road two to three times per month. His evidence was that Ms Wu was always the person who answered the door. He observed Ms Wu cooking for Mr Shen and physically supporting him as he moved around the house, especially when he climbed stairs.
Mr Li was asked a series of questions about a Land Rover which, on his account, Mr Shen gifted to him. It was submitted by Mr Morahan in writing that there were unexplained discrepancies about the paperwork for the transfer of the Land Rover, and Mr Shen remained the registered owner until 20 May 2023. I do not accept that the evidence established any impropriety in relation to the gifting of the Land Rover. The written submissions make reference to Ms Lam’s expert opinion that the signature on the transfer documentation that was purportedly that of Mr Shen was probably not written by him. For the reasons set out below under Issue 1 concerning the evidence of the handwriting experts, I am hesitant to rely on Ms Lam’s opinion. In any event, it was not put to Mr Li that he had any involvement in the preparation of an inauthentic document. In the circumstances, I am not satisfied that a proper basis was established to draw any relevant connection was drawn between the circumstances of that transfer and the credibility or reliability of the evidence that Mr Li gave on the facts that are relevant to determination of this matter.

Ms Shen and Gordon called a number of witnesses with a view to falsifying Ms Wu’s claims about the nature of her relationship with Mr Shen.
Some of the witnesses called by Ms Shen and Gordon fall into the category of relatives and friends who were not aware of Mr Shen having a romantic relationship with Ms Wu, or aware of Ms Wu living with Mr Shen.
This included Ms Shen and Gordon, each of whom gave evidence denying that Ms Wu lived with Mr Shen or was his de facto partner. I attach no weight to that evidence. Both were estranged from Mr Shen from early 2020 and, during that period, had no, or at most extremely limited, opportunity to observe his domestic and personal affairs. Gordon reconnected with Mr Shen from July 2022, at which time he was introduced to Ms Wu and interacted with her on a number of occasions. Mr Shen’s own communications to Gordon about Ms Wu are consistent with the conclusion that Ms Wu was Mr Shen’s companion as well as the person providing care for him. To the extent that Gordon’s impression remained that Ms Wu was not the partner of Mr Shen or his carer, that impression was inaccurate.
Haoguan Wu was a childhood friend of Mr Shen. They communicated by WeChat and also by videocalls. Haoguan Wu gave evidence that around 2019 or 2020 he and Mr Shen were having a videocall while Mr Shen was having coffee with Ms Wu at a coffee shop. Mr Shen introduced Ms Wu as “a friend” of his. Mr Wu said that he had a later conversation, at some unspecified point around 2020, with Mr Shen in which he warned him about Ms Wu being shrewd and someone that Mr Shen needed to be careful of. Mr Shen assured him that he did not need to worry because Ms Wu mainly helped him with translation and grocery shopping. Even accepting that such a conversation occurred in 2020, I do not regard a passing reference of this kind, evidently intended to assuage his friend’s concerns, as undermining the other evidence about the nature of the relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu.
Under cross-examination it became apparent that Mr Wu had no recollection of WeChat messages that he received from Mr Shen which gave a positive account of Ms Wu, including that she was kind-hearted and that she took care of his daily life and overall wellbeing. Mr Wu denied Mr Shen said any such things in the WeChat group messages. That denial is plainly unreliable in the face of the records of the WeChat messages sent by Mr Shen.
Shanyi Su was also a childhood friend of Mr Shen. He lives in the Jinshan District of Shanghai. Mr Su and Mr Shen communicated regularly via WeChat, phone calls and videocalls. Mr Su recalled Mr Shen first mentioning Ms Wu in 2019. He described her as a “lawyer person” that he knew who helped him with English translation. Mr Shen described Ms Wu as “warm hearted”. Once during a videocall, which normally occurred weekly around 9pm to 10pm, Mr Su saw Ms Wu and at the end of the call Mr Shen said that Ms Wu needed to go home. Shanyi Su did not otherwise recall Ms Wu being visible in Mr Shen’s house during their videocalls.
Shanyi Su claimed that Mr Shen never introduced Ms Wu as his partner, wife or girlfriend. Mr Su says that at some point around 2021 he asked Mr Shen if he had considered developing a romantic relationship with Ms Wu, to which he responded “no way” and indicated that he did not find Ms Wu to be his “type”. Shanyi Su described another conversation when he again asked Mr Shen about whether he would consider Ms Wu as someone to take care of him. According to Mr Su, Mr Shen repeated that she was not his type, and he was content with just having her assist him with his affairs. Mr Shen also said, according to Mr Su, that Ms Wu was of questionable character, was “kind of greedy” and “likes to take advantage of others”.
When challenged about the WeChat messages that Mr Shen had sent to him which described Ms Wu in positive terms, including as his “close buddy”, Mr Su claimed never to have received such messages or heard any such sentiment from Mr Shen. Mr Su also specifically denied receiving any photographs of Ms Wu from Mr Shen. He went so far as to suggest that this was all a fabrication.
Mr Su’s evidence on these points is falsified by the objective evidence of the WeChat messages sent by Mr Shen. Mr Su may be sincere in his recollection of what Mr Shen told him. He may also be influenced by his strong view, which he acknowledged holding, that Ms Wu should not be entitled to any part of Mr Shen’s estate. In any event, it is clear that Mr Su’s memory of what Mr Shen said to him in his various communications is mistaken.
In the circumstances, I do not find Mr Su’s evidence about how Mr Shen introduced Ms Wu, referred to their relationship and described her character to be reliable. The WeChat messages that passed between Mr Shen and his friends in China, including Shanyi Su, are inconsistent with Mr Su’s evidence. It is possible that Mr Shen had a conversation with Mr Su in which he made less positive comments about Ms Wu. However, I find it improbable that a conversation occurred in the terms now given by Mr Su. The records of the WeChat messages provide a more reliable indication of Mr Shen’s thoughts and communications at the time. My conclusion about the reliability of Mr Su’s evidence is relevant to the Harrington Street Property, addressed separately below.
Shirley Lai-Hung Chan is a registered conveyancer. She knew Mr Shen for more than 25 years. She performed conveyancing services for Mr Shen over the course of two decades, involving (on Ms Chan’s estimation) more than seven conveyances. Ms Chan met Ms Guo (Mr Shen’s then wife). Ms Chan was not introduced to Ms Wu, and she had no knowledge of any connection between Mr Shen and Ms Wu.
Ms Chan’s evidence sheds no light on the nature of the relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu. Notwithstanding that Ms Chan had occasion to meet Ms Guo in the past, it is unremarkable that Mr Shen visited Ms Chan’s offices without Ms Wu. It is equally unremarkable that Ms Chan did not come to know of the relationship that existed between Mr Shen and Ms Wu. The nature of Ms Chan’s dealings with Mr Shen was not such as to make it inevitable, or even to be expected, that she would have become aware of Mr Shen’s domestic arrangements or romantic entanglements.
I would place the evidence given by Qiang Zhou in the same category. Mr Zhou is a property manager at JW Realty. He is married to another witness, Ms Bing Wang. He has an information technology background, and after he met Mr Shen in 2020 he provided various forms of assistance to him, including to address technological issues at his house. Mr Zhou gave evidence that he visited Mr Shen’s house at some stage in around mid-2021 to discuss the installation of surveillance cameras. He went through much of the house checking the strength of the wireless signal. Mr Zhou observed that the kitchen and living room were messy. Apart from Mr Shen’s bedroom the other bedrooms were empty and did not show signs of someone living in them. Mr Zhou did not see any women’s shoes, clothes or toiletries in the house. Mr Zhou made some later visits to Mr Shen’s house, also in 2021. Mr Zhou formed the impression that Mr Shen lived alone and needed a lot of assistance as he did not speak English and COVID made his life more difficult. Mr Zhou did not see Ms Wu at the house and Mr Shen did not refer to her as a girlfriend or de facto partner. According to Mr Zhou, Mr Shen and Ms Wu did visit JW Realty together in mid-2021 to discuss the divorce process that Mr Shen was involved in.
I accept Mr Zhou’s evidence, but I do not find it to be of particular assistance in making findings about the nature of the relationship that existed between Mr Shen and Ms Wu over the period from 2019 to 2023. All that it ultimately establishes is that Mr Zhou formed an impression based on his visits to Mr Shen’s house in 2021 that Mr Shen lived alone at that time. As Mr Zhou conceded in cross-examination, he did not inspect the bathrooms. He did not open any cupboards or wardrobes. Nor does he appear to have investigated the contents of Mr Shen’s bedroom. It is entirely plausible that around the time of Mr Zhou’s visit in 2021 Ms Wu may have been a regular overnight visitor to the house, as indicated by other evidence, without Mr Zhou having observed signs of that.
I would not infer that because Mr Zhou did not personally observe Ms Wu in the house or detect signs of her living there the true position is that Ms Wu was not living or staying at the house at all. Nor would I infer that because Mr Zhou observed the living room and kitchen to be messy on a particular day that Ms Wu is lying or exaggerating when she gives detailed and cogent evidence about being a regular visitor to the house and performing cleaning and cooking assistance to Mr Shen. Perhaps Mr Zhou visited on a day when Ms Wu had been at her mother’s house and was yet to clean up after Mr Shen. It is not fruitful to speculate. It is sufficient to observe that Mr Zhou’s evidence is not logically inconsistent with Ms Wu’s evidence when it comes to her relationship with Mr Shen.
Bing Wang provided real estate agent services to Mr Shen over a number of years and in respect of a number of property transactions. Her evidence relevant to the characterisation of the purchase of the Harrington Street Property is dealt with below. In terms of Mr Shen’s relationship with Ms Wu, Ms Wang gave evidence that Mr Shen never described Ms Wu to her as his de facto partner or girlfriend. I do not find that evidence to be of forensic significance. Having regard to the professional relationship between Ms Wang and Mr Shen and the limited insight that Ms Wang had into his life and domestic arrangements, it is unremarkable that Mr Shen did not have occasion to describe Ms Wu as his girlfriend or de facto partner.
Meiyu Shao is a travel agent who provided travel services to Mr Shen, and became friends with him. She gave evidence that Mr Shen made romantic overtures to her, including when he was married to Ms Guo and during the period when Ms Wu says she was with Mr Shen. Mr Shen sent suggestive messages to Ms Shao, but they never became romantically or sexually involved. Ms Shao says that Mr Shen did not mention Ms Wu to her, and as far as she knew Mr Shen lived alone after he divorced Ms Guo.
Ms Wu said in response to this evidence that she found it upsetting in the course of these proceedings to see the messages (for the first time) that passed between Mr Shen and Ms Shao because they appear flirtatious and they occurred during the time that Mr Shen and Ms Wu were in a relationship. I agree with Ms Wu’s characterisation of the communications. Her reaction is also a reflection of the lack of forensic significance of the material. Ms Shao’s evidence shows that Mr Shen was engaging in flirtatious exchanges with another woman while he was with Ms Wu. That is embarrassing to Ms Wu, but given the clear evidence from other sources it does not lead to a conclusion that he was not in fact in a steady romantic relationship with Ms Wu. Although said in a different context, the observation of the Court of Appeal in Bar-Mordecai v Hillston [2004] NSWCA 65 at [125] is apposite: the existence of a domestic relationship is not necessarily inconsistent with “bouts of selfishness or infidelity”. Nor is it surprising that Mr Shen, who was apparently pursuing some kind of romantic connection with Ms Shao, did not tell her about his relationship with Ms Wu.
Ms Shen and Gordon point to written messages that Mr Shen sent conveying a sense of loneliness and isolation at particular times. It may be accepted that there were several communications of this kind which, at face value, could be taken to suggest that Mr Shen had no regular companion in his day to day life (which in turn might suggest that Ms Wu had exaggerated her role in Mr Shen’s life). Understood in context, however, I do not regard the communications as being persuasive to this effect.
On 6 April 2023, Mr Shen sent Ms Meiyu Shao a message which said “It’s been over a year since the divorce! I’m alone, lonely, but free. Quite nice … Not a single friend outside, not a single relative inside”. In light of Mr Shen’s flirtatious interactions with Ms Shao, addressed above, it is unsurprising that Mr Shen may have wished to give the impression that he was alone, lonely and available. I do not treat this communication as evidence that this was truly the case at the time with Mr Shen.
Ms Shen and Gordon also point to messages sent to Gordon which likewise implied that Mr Shen was alone and lonely. On 1 May 2023 Mr Shen sent a message to Gordon which said “Grandfather is old, and being alone makes me feel lonely and exhausted!”. This is one of a number of messages sent by Mr Shen to Gordon in which I detect a considerable amount of emotional manipulation on the part of Mr Shen. Gordon was stuck in something of a tug-of-war between his parents and Mr Shen. Mr Shen was evidently demanding of as much attention, loyalty and time as he could extract from Gordon. Given that context, I regard statements of this kind as being a reflection of Mr Shen wanting to paint a picture of his life that served his purposes at the time, rather than reflecting a more sober and fair assessment of his circumstances. It is otherwise clear that in his interactions with Gordon, Mr Shen regularly treated Ms Wu as his life companion and described her in such terms.

Mr Shen was in the habit of making regular diary entries in a lined notebook. He made handwritten entries in Chinese characters. His habit was to handwrite the day and month against each entry.
It was common ground that one quirk in Mr Shen’s diary entries is that he recorded financial transactions in Australian dollars as being in yuan (¥), and without adjustment according to the exchange rate. For example, a purchase price of $38,000 would be recorded by Mr Shen in his diary as ¥38,000.
A copy of the pages of the final diary of Mr Shen, spanning the period 1 December 2021 to 23 May 2023, was in evidence in the original Chinese language form. English translations of the entries were also in evidence. The diary shows entries made for most days throughout that period. Sometimes there is more than one entry for a particular date. They often record appointments, business transactions and the expenditure of money. In some cases there is more than one entry for a particular date. When this occurred, one of the entries was often made in the header at the top of the page.
An example appears on the page covering the period from 24 March 2023 to 31 March 2023, shown below. It can be seen that Mr Shen made two entries for 30 March. One of those entries was made in the header at the top of the page, and effectively out of sequence:
Ms Shen and Gordon Dang dispute the authenticity of the entry dated 22 May 2023 (Disputed Diary Entry). This is the entry which is said by Ms Wu to constitute the 2023 Informal Will.
Subject to one significant qualification, it was common ground between the parties that, other than the Disputed Diary Entry, all of the entries recorded in the diary for the period 1 December 2021 to 23 May 2023 were made by Mr Shen. For the purposes of analysis by the handwriting experts called by the parties, this collection of handwritten entries was referred to as the “Known Handwriting” of Mr Shen. The Disputed Diary Entry was treated by both handwriting experts as the “Questioned Handwriting”.
The qualification is that Ms Lam, the forensic handwriting expert called by Ms Shen and Gordon Dang, also called into question the authenticity of an additional entry, being an entry in the diary dated 23 May 2023 which appears at the bottom of the penultimate page and concludes in the header of the final page.
The final three pages of the diary appear as follows, the first two pages being taken from the scan of the diary and the third/final page from Ms Lam’s report, which is discussed below:
The annotations shown in red in the left-hand column on the final page (Q-L1, Q-L2 etc) were added by Ms Lam and are useful to understand the forensic handwriting analysis that she performed.
On the penultimate page of the diary a further example appears of Mr Shen having made an entry in the header at the top of the page. The English translation of that entry is:

Ms Lam concluded that the final two entries (i.e. the Disputed Diary Entry and the entry for 23 May) were written by someone other than Mr Shen. She reasoned that these forged entries were “highly likely” created by a tracing method. This would likely have required the forger to compile a collection of traced characters, selecting the desired characters from the Known Handwriting in the diary. Ms Lam considered that the most likely method involving creating an intermediate tracing template by collating those traced characters into a collection which matched the desired entry. She considered that the preliminary tracing processes may have been repeated several times. The collation of forged characters could then have been reproduced in the notebook, using a tracing technique. This would have involved placing the template under the relevant page of the notebook and shining light from an artificial or natural source through the template and the notebook page, so as to allow the characters to be reproduced on the other side of the notebook page.
Ms Wong, the expert called by Ms Wu, correctly observed that there would have been only one chance to make the final entry in the notebook. It follows that, whatever scope there may have been to rehearse or prepare a tracing beforehand, there would have been no opportunity to correct any mistake once the entry was made in the notebook. The putative forger would have instead had only one opportunity to reproduce the characters in the notebook using this tracing technique. That is in circumstances where the Disputed Diary Entry does not feature any apparent mistakes and, on any view, achieved a remarkable degree of similarity with Mr Shen’s known style of handwriting.
Mr Morahan submits in response that this overlooks that there would have been scope for the forger to make more than one attempt at the preliminary steps when copying individual characters from the Known Handwriting and then creating the intermediate template. That is true as far as it goes, although it tends to reinforce the probability that the forging exercise would have been complex and time-consuming. It also does not gainsay the key point made by Ms Wong which is that the final step of making ink entries in the notebook could only be performed once. I find it to be particularly improbable that a forger would have achieved such a sophisticated forgery without any errors or corrections.
I have set out above my findings about the movements of Mr Shen and Ms Wu in the time leading up to his death, and the movements of Ms Wu and others on the night that Mr Shen’s body was discovered. What emerges from those findings is the lack of any realistic opportunity for anyone, including Ms Wu, to have made a forged entry in Mr Shen’s diary before the diary was taken away by Ms Shen.
On Ms Shen’s own account, she took the diary from the Queens Road House after Mr Shen’s death. Gordon explains in his evidence that this occurred on the following morning when he, his mother and his father returned to the house and removed the contents of the filing cabinet. When Ms Shen inspected the diary, she found the Disputed Diary Entry. No party suggested that Ms Shen was responsible for forging the entry. Given its contents and given her refusal to accept the authenticity of that entry, that would be an implausible hypothesis. The same can be said of Gordon. Nor was there any suggestion that any other person with an interest in forging the 22 May 2023 entry had access to the diary after it was in the possession of Ms Shen.
That leaves only the possibility that someone accessed the diary and forged the Disputed Diary Entry before it was removed by Ms Shen into her possession. That could theoretically have occurred before Mr Shen’s death. I would reject that as a serious possibility. Before his death there was no indication to anyone except perhaps Mr Shen himself that Mr Shen was about to experience a severe health episode or become incapacitated. In the ordinary course, he would have been expected to keep up his usual practice of accessing his diary most days and recording entries. Obviously enough, if someone had inserted the Disputed Diary Entry into his notebook he would have noticed and been alarmed to find an entry which he had not made and which purported to state his testamentary intentions. No one connected with Mr Shen could have thought that tampering with his diary in this way while he was still alive and healthy would have been an effective way of creating a forged will.
The first that anyone knew that Mr Shen had suffered a serious health episode was when he was discovered by Tony in an unresponsive state at around 5pm on 24 May 2023. The remaining possibility in terms of accessing and tampering with the diary is therefore that someone made a forged entry in between that time and when Ms Shen, Gordon and Lei Dang took possession of the diary later the next morning.
It is unrealistic, if not fanciful, to suggest that this was a window of opportunity in which someone retrieved the diary and carried out the exercise of forgery that I have described above. There was a window of opportunity of several hours, but multiple people were present and the scene was understandably chaotic. The only people in the house during this time, aside from police and ambulance officers, were Tony, Ms Shen, Gordon, Lei Dang, Ms Wu and possibly Selena Tang. No party suggested that Tony would have had any reason to involve himself in Mr Shen’s affairs by tampering with his diary. Nor does it make sense to posit that Ms Shen, Gordon or Lei Dang did so.
As for Ms Wu, she was understandably in a state of shock and distress, and she was engaging with others in a house full of people. The evidence discloses interactions between, on the one hand, Ms Wu and, on the other hand, Tony, ambulance officers, police officers, Ms Shen, Gordon and Lei Dang. Ms Wu left the house before Ms Shen, Gordon and Lei Dang on the night of 24 May 2023. It was not put to Ms Wu that, contrary to her evidence, she returned to the Queens Road House at some point before Ms Shen, Gordon and Lei Dang came back the next morning. By the time Ms Wu returned later that day, the contents of the filing cabinet had been removed. That leaves only the night of Mr Shen’s death. The proposition that Ms Wu snuck away from the attention of others and had the physical and emotional composure to perform a sophisticated and time-consuming forgery, without being detected by any of the other people in the house, is entirely implausible. These considerations alone provide a compelling basis to conclude that the 2023 Informal Will was written by Mr Shen and not by someone else.
If the expert evidence provided a strong basis to reach a different conclusion, that could theoretically cast matters in a different light. But that is not the case. In fact the expert evidence, properly analysed, demonstrates that there is no good reason to doubt the authenticity of the diary entry. It serves only to reinforce the conclusion that the Questioned Handwriting, like the Known Handwriting, was that of Mr Shen. My reasons for reaching that conclusion are set out below.

Ms Wu called Ms Kiki (Hong Ting Minesha) Wong. Ms Wong is an expert in forensic handwriting analysis in Chinese and English. She has more than two decades of experience in the forensic field generally and has specialised experience in forensic handwriting examination. She is now a director and Head of Forensics at The Forensics Company Limited, based in Hong Kong. She has previously been employed at New Scotland Yard in London, as an Assistant Forensic Scientist in the DNA section at The Forensic Science Service in London. She is a professional member of The Chartered Society of Forensic Sciences in the UK, and an affiliate member of The American Society of Questioned Document Examiners USA.
Ms Wong set out certain basic principles regarding handwriting which inform the task of forensic handwriting analysis. There was no suggestion in the evidence of Ms Lam (the expert called by the defendants) or in submissions that the basic principles are controversial. The relevant principles include the following:
writing is an acquired skill that is a complex perceptual-motor task;
the execution of writing is a voluntary act that follows behaviour patterns learned as habits;
owing to natural variations, no two writings of the same material by the same person are identical;
more complex handwriting is less likely to share the same elements and is less likely to be the product of a successful simulation; and
identification of authorship of handwriting depends on the discovery in the questioned handwriting of a combination of personal characteristics which lie within the range of variation of the known (authentic) specimens.
Ms Wong gave evidence about the nature of Chinese characters. Such characters are constructed using a combination of strokes and patterns. They have a square-shaped structure. Various components can be used as the building blocks of a character. Chinese characters can be written in a “Traditional” or “Simplified” form. There are tens of thousands of Traditional characters. Simplified characters were introduced around the 1950s and there are over 8000 such characters. The fundamental principles of handwriting apply consistently to both Traditional and Simplified characters.
The analysis performed by Ms Wong involved an analysis of the characteristics of the Disputed Diary Entry (described in her report as the “Questioned Handwriting”) and all of the entries in the diary other than that entry (described as the “Known Handwriting”). This was done on the basis that the Known Handwriting was treated as the handwriting of Mr Shen, which then enabled identification of the characteristics of his handwriting and comparison with the characteristics of the Questioned Handwriting.
Ms Wong used a computer software program called “Write-On”. The program does not itself perform analysis but rather assists in collecting, managing, searching and comparing large quantities of typed and handwritten documents. Ms Wong used the program to compile a database of the Known Handwriting and the Questioned Handwriting. She explained in her report that the data provided a good basis for comparison, as the Known Handwriting samples were contemporaneous, sufficient in quantity and quality and clear characteristics and habit areas were observed.
Ms Wong described the Disputed Diary Entry as involving a mixture of Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, with various numerical entries, punctuation marks and highlighting in the form of a rectangular box around part of the entry. It is written in a running and cursive style. The Known Handwriting likewise contained a mixture of Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, numerical entries, punctuation marks and highlighting and symbols of emphasis, in the form of different shapes and arrows.
Ms Wong considered the handwriting in the diary by reference to a number of means of measurement, assessment and characterisation. These included the following:
the width-height ratio of the characters;
relative position of strokes;
relative distance between strokes;
tilt and slant of stroke;
relative distance between characters;
stroke length;
pen emphasis and shading;
symmetry factor;
parallelism;
character construction; and
relative alignment of character with baseline.
Ms Wong observed that the Known Handwriting was performed with a black-inked writing instrument such as a gel or rollerball pen. It was written fluently and with spontaneity, the line quality and pen pressure were consistent with the writing being that of a person used to writing by hand. Ms Wong observed a number of habitual features such as the use of hand-drawn shapes, arrows and stars and the addition of dots between characters.
Applying these methods, Ms Wong did not detect variations in the Questioned Handwriting, as compared with the Known Handwriting, that went beyond the natural variations that were typical of Mr Shen’s handwriting such as to raise suspicion. No significant differences were found. She found commonalities including in respect of pen emphasis, parallelism, pen pressure, symmetry and the relative alignment of handwriting to the baseline. Ms Wong further observed similarities in terms of additions of dots within the text, missing strokes, construction of characters in the writer’s own style which departed from the copybook style.
Ms Wong’s conclusion was that the Questioned Handwriting, like the Known Handwriting, was written by Mr Shen.
Nothing in the cross-examination of Ms Wong caused me to have any doubt about her credibility or the reliability of her expert evidence. Ms Lam’s evidence (considered below) did not consider Ms Wong’s methodology or reasoning in a way that suggests any deficiencies. Nor did Ms Shen and Gordon make any submissions, either in writing or orally, that exposed any material flaws in the reasoning or methodology of Ms Wong. They instead simply urged that Ms Lam’s opinion should be preferred.
I accept the submission of Ms Sanders that the evidence of Ms Wong was coherent, well-reasoned and based on an application of accepted international standards and a clear methodology. I have no hesitation in accepting the accuracy of her opinions.

Ms Lam, like Ms Wong, conducted a comparison between the Known Handwriting of Mr Shen and the Questioned Handwriting that was to be assessed for the possibility of inauthenticity. However, it transpired that there was a significant difference in Ms Lam’s identification of which entries belonged in which category.
Ms Lam gave evidence in her report that certain characters appearing in the Disputed Diary Entry and also in the entry for 23 May 2023 at the top of the same page were “identical” to characters appearing in the Known Handwriting. The report did not explain what Ms Lam meant by “identical” in this context. The reader was thus left with the impression that Ms Lam was using the word “identical” in a conventional way, signifying that the characters being compared were precisely the same. Ms Lam included in her report various figures which showed the characters in question being superimposed on each other. That exercise illustrated that the characters were not “identical” in the ordinary sense of that term. What those images showed was that in various places parts of the characters matched up to some degree, whereas other parts of the characters did not match up in any substantial way.
Under cross-examination, it emerged that when Ms Lam used the word “identical” to describe two versions of a Chinese character what she in fact intended to convey was there was a substantial similarity between those two versions, or that they were “very similar”, to a degree that she considered significant.
Ms Lam explained that there was correspondence between the compared characters in terms of strokes, proportions, turning angles and points of intersection. Of the 57 Chinese characters that appear in the Questioned Handwriting, Ms Lam identified 13 characters that she opined showed a high degree of correspondence with the same characters as they appeared in the Known Handwriting. This is what Ms Lam meant when she described certain characters as being “identical”. On the premise that no person writes the same character in exactly the same way twice, the degree of correspondence was such as to lead Ms Lam to conclude that the Questioned Handwriting was the product of copying from pre-existing versions of the characters in the Known Handwriting. There were additional aspects of Ms Lam’s reasons for reaching this conclusion which I return to below.
It is, as Ms Sanders submitted, unfortunate that in addressing these matters in her report Ms Lam used the term “identical” without an explanation that Ms Lam did not mean identical in the usual sense. Among other things, if Ms Lam had addressed this point squarely in her report, it might be expected that she would have explained what degree of similarity (rather than precise identity) is required when comparing two versions of a character in order to constitute evidence of forgery. Ms Lam would also have explained, presumably, what features such as strokes, stop points, proportions and pen lifts, were of particular significance in assessing the degree of similarity warranting the conclusion that two samples were “identical”. That in turn would have necessitated some explanation of whether there is an accepted scientific basis for adopting that approach. These were points never adequately explained by Ms Lam, including in her oral evidence.
It is of particular significance because Ms Lam’s reasoning proceeded from the starting proposition that no person naturally writes the same character in exactly the same way twice. Even accepting that this is the case, it was not suggested that no person writes the same character in a substantially similar way twice. Ms Lam proceeded as if the similarities that she observed between the compared characters were of such a nature and degree that they were equivalent to being truly identical. In the absence of any proper explanation of the reasoning leading to this conclusion, I do not find it persuasive.
There were other features of the Questioned Handwriting that Ms Lam considered suspicious. One was that it featured heavier ink density, which was said to be consistent with slower writing. Ms Lam also relied on differences in pen emphasis and shading as supporting the tracing hypothesis.
Ms Lam considered that the Known Handwriting that she analysed demonstrated fluency, naturalness and spontaneity, whereas the Questioned Handwriting displayed heavier ink density indicative of slower writing. She also found that the Known Handwriting emphasised vertical strokes with shading towards the right, whereas the Questioned Handwriting emphasised horizontal strokes with shading towards the lower section. In this respect there was a direct difference between the conclusions reached by Ms Wong on the corresponding metrics of analysis. I am inclined to prefer Ms Wong’s analysis, but the difference is not decisive. That is because Ms Lam based her ultimate conclusion on a combination of factors, the majority of which do not withstand scrutiny.

As noted above, an important subsidiary issue emerged during the cross-examination of Ms Lam. In her report, Ms Lam effectively treated at least part of the entry in the diary dated 23 May 2023 as being part of the “Questioned Handwriting”, rather than as part of the “Known Handwriting”. The entry for 23 May 2023 referred to Mr Shen paying $39,800 for a jade bracelet as a present for Ms Wu. This was an accurate reference to what had in fact occurred at the dinner held on 23 May 2023 at the house of Mr Wang and Ms Deng.
Ms Lam’s analysis of Mr Shen’s handwriting proceeded on the basis that at least part of this entry for 23 May should be categorised with the Disputed Diary Entry as Questioned Handwriting. The part focused on in Ms Lam’s analysis was labelled by her as “Q-L1” (see version extracted at [288] above).
From that premise, Ms Lam compared a number of characters that appeared on Q-L1 with characters appearing in the Known Handwriting. Ms Lam identified through that comparison a number of features that she considered to be indicative of forgery. One was an apparent identity between the Chinese character for “buy” as written in Q-L1 and the equivalent character appearing in an earlier entry within the Known Handwriting (made on 17/09). Ms Lam also identified differences in emphasis as between the horizontal stroke and the vertical stroke, again comparing characters in Q-L1 with characters in the Known Handwriting. Ms Lam also adopted the same approach in incorporating the characters appearing in Q-L1 into her width-to-height ratio.
This was not consistent with Ms Lam’s instructions. Those instructions, like the equivalent instructions given to Ms Wong, asked Ms Lam to assume that the Known Handwriting comprised all of the entries other than the disputed entry of 22 May 2023, and that all such Known Handwriting was the authentic handwriting of Mr Shen.
The shift in approach is not explained in Ms Lam’s report. That report on its face describes the “Known Handwriting” as being all entries other than the Disputed Diary Entry, including the entry for 23 May 2023. Ms Lam did not explain in her report that, despite her instructions and despite her description of what comprised the Known Handwriting, she decided to take at least part of the entry of 23 May 2023 out of the category of Known Handwriting and into the category of Questioned Handwriting. One possibility was that Ms Lam made an error and mistakenly treated part of the entry of 23 May 2023 (identified as Q-L1 above) as if it were part of the Disputed Diary Entry. However, Ms Lam denied this under cross-examination. She instead ventured the explanation that she had detected “suspicious” features of the entry of 23 May 2023 which led her to treat it as further Questioned Handwriting and not as part of the Known Handwriting.
Unfortunately, this was not explained by Ms Lam in a way that allows me to be satisfied that this was the subject of careful analysis or that there was a scientifically justifiable basis for this shift in approach.
Moreover, the logical implications of Ms Lam’s preferred approach do not withstand scrutiny. Ms Lam concluded that it was highly likely that the disputed entry of 22 May 2023 was not written by Mr Shen but was the result of tracing. Her reasoning implicitly involved the same conclusion in respect of the entry dated 23 May 2023. This involves the unstated hypothesis that the person who forged the 22 May 2023 entry in Mr Shen’s diary, with the intention that it would operate as a will, also took the trouble to forge the entry of 23 May 2023.
This explanation is so inherently implausible as to be bordering on the absurd. For the reasons I have already given, if any opportunity existed to forge the entry comprising the informal will it was vanishingly small. It is one thing to posit that a person wishing to create a false impression of Mr Shen’s testamentary wishes forged the disputed entry of 22 May 2023. It is another thing altogether to suggest that the same person took the trouble to forge an innocuous entry about the dinner on 23 May 2023 and the purchase of jade. No reason has been suggested for why that would have been done. That entry did not make the disputed entry appear any more authentic. Indeed, because it occurred out of sequence and was partly recorded in the header on the same page as the disputed entry, it became one of the reasons put forward by Ms Shen and Gordon to dispute the authenticity of the disputed entry on 22 May 2023.
I therefore reject the suggestion, implicit in Ms Lam’s approach, that the entry dated 23 May 2023 was written by someone other than Mr Shen. I find that it was written by Mr Shen, who accurately recorded the information about the dinner and the acquisition of the jade bracelet (being information which would have only been known at the time by himself, Ms Wu, Mr Wang and Ms Deng).
Sensibly, Mr Morahan did not seek to defend Ms Lam’s approach in unilaterally reclassifying the second entry on 23 May 2023 as part of the Questioned Handwriting. He acknowledged that Ms Lam may have made a mistake in this respect. Instead, he submitted that this erroneous step in Ms Lam’s approach did not affect the overall reliability of her report. I reject that submission. Once it is appreciated, as I have found, that the entry for 23 May 2023 was handwritten by Mr Shen, the reasons for Ms Lam’s conclusions in her report become entirely unconvincing.
As explained above, Ms Lam compared characters that appeared in the entry for 23 May 2023 with the same characters that appeared elsewhere in the Known Handwriting of Mr Shen. Based on that comparison (along with equivalent comparisons involving characters appearing in the Disputed Diary Entry), Ms Lam concluded that the various similarities between the handwriting in each case were so striking as to indicate a forgery, rather than simply a further instance of Mr Shen writing the same character in a similar way. Once it is appreciated that at least some of the pairs compared by Ms Lam were in fact two instances of handwriting by Mr Shen, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that Ms Lam has reached the wrong conclusion. In other words, the similarities that she has observed must be merely similarities generated by Mr Shen when writing the same characters more than once. They are not indicative of forgery.
The implications of this can be illustrated by the fact that Ms Lam found that 13 characters that featured in the “Questioned Handwriting” were identical matches with the same characters appearing in the “Known Handwriting”. Two of the 13 were characters taken from Q-L1 as part of the entry for 23 May. The Court cannot simply remove those two examples from Ms Lam’s list and proceed on the basis that 11 characters within the Questioned Handwriting have been persuasively shown to be identical with the characters in the Known Handwriting, thus revealing forgery. A more fundamental flaw has been exposed which infects the reasoning as to all 13 characters. The difficulty is not merely that two examples should be excluded. Rather, Ms Lam’s methodology produced a false positive when applied to handwriting that the parties accepted was in fact written by Mr Shen.
Once that is appreciated, the Court can have no confidence in the methodology and evaluation employed by Ms Lam to reach the same conclusion about the Disputed Diary Entry as a whole.

Putting aside the problem with redrawing the boundary between the Questioned Handwriting and the Known Handwriting, other aspects of the reasoning of Ms Lam were also unpersuasive.
Ms Lam concluded that in the Known Handwriting Mr Shen had a characteristic way of writing exclamation marks, with the dot at the bottom of the exclamation mark appearing either directly beneath or to the right of the stem. Ms Lam found that in the Questioned Handwriting the dot appeared to the left of the stem. Under cross-examination Ms Lam explained that in reaching this conclusion she conducted what she intended to be a comprehensive survey of all of the exclamation marks that appear in the diary. In fact, as demonstrated in the cross-examination that ensued, there are multiple examples within the Known Handwriting of exclamation marks where the dot appears to the left of the stem. Ms Lam conceded that to be the case in respect of at least some of the examples put to her. She explained that she must have overlooked these examples when reviewing the Known Handwriting. The net result is that this part of the justification for Ms Lam’s conclusion about the forging of the Questioned Handwriting falls away.
Ms Lam also found that in the Known Handwriting there was a noticeable gap between the date and the first word following the date. Ms Lam concluded that the Questioned Handwriting did not exhibit the same gap. Having reviewed the Known Handwriting and the Questioned Handwriting I am not persuaded that there is any such consistent pattern supporting a conclusion that there is a relevant difference in the Disputed Diary Entry.
Ms Lam observed a “hanging indent style” in the Known Handwriting which she considered to be distinguishable from the indented style in the Questioned Handwriting. Again, my own review of the evidence leads me to disagree with Ms Lam’s conclusion. There is in fact a reasonable degree of variation in the form of the indenting from entry to entry. Sometimes the different lines for a particular entry may align on a straight vertical indent, fitting the description of a hanging indent. Sometimes the lines are on a sloping angle, with one or more lines starting directly below the date rather than being indented. Ms Lam drew coloured lines on the reproductions within her report to illustrate her analysis of the different indenting styles. That exercise actually demonstrates that in order to reach her conclusion Ms Lam imposed somewhat arbitrary lines that cut through text which appeared to the left of that supposed indenting line. Ultimately I am not persuaded that there is a material difference between the formatting of the handwriting in the Questioned Handwriting as compared with the Known Handwriting.
For the reasons set out above, I am satisfied that the 2023 Informal Will was written by Mr Shen.

It is common ground that the 2023 Informal Will was not executed in accordance with the requirements of Pt 2.1 of the Succession Act. Having found that Mr Shen made the diary entry comprising the 2023 Informal Will, the question then arises as to whether the Court should recognise the 2023 Informal Will pursuant to s 8 of the Succession Act.
There is no difficulty in this context in finding that the 2023 Informal Will constitutes a document for the purposes of the Succession Act. Section 8 applies to that document if the document purports to state the testamentary intentions of Mr Shen (s 8(1)(a)) and has not been executed in accordance with Pt 2.1 of the Act (s 8(1)(b)). That first question is whether the diary entry purports to state the testamentary intentions of Mr Shen.
If I am satisfied that it does, then in circumstances where (as is common ground) it was not executed in accordance with Pt 2.1, s 8 applies and the question becomes whether I am satisfied, pursuant to s 8(2)(a), that Mr Shen intended the diary entry to form his will.
In making a decision under s 8(2), the Court may, in addition to having regard to the document in question, also have regard to any evidence relating to the manner in which the document was executed and any evidence of the testamentary intentions of the deceased person, including evidence of statements made by the deceased person: s 8(3); Wheatley v Peek [2025] NSWCA 265 at [44] (Wheatley v Peek). These specified matters do not limit the matters that the Court may have regard to in making a decision under s 8(2): s 8(4).
Beginning with s 8(1)(a), it is plain in my view from the terms of the diary entry that the document purports to state the testamentary intentions of Mr Shen. That also feeds into my conclusion that, pursuant to s 8(2)(a), Mr Shen intended the document itself to form his will.
The latter requirement was considered in Rodny v Weisbord (2020) 102 NSWLR 403; [2020] NSWCA 22 by Meagher JA (with whom McCallum and White JJA agreed), at [17]-[18] (Rodny v Weisbord):

It is not enough that a document records the intentions of the putative testator about how they wish their property to be disposed of after death, as a matter of information or interest. The document must be one which is intended to operate as a request, explicit or implicit, to those responsible to see that the stated wishes of the deceased are acted on: In the Estate of Knibbs, deceased; Flay v Trueman [1962] 1 WLR 852 at 855-856, quoted with approval in Application by Maggie Riman (Estate of Rita Riman) [2022] NSWSC 872 at [72]. The critical question is whether the deceased intended the document itself to form the will of the deceased: Wheatley v Peek at [43].
There are a number of aspects of the Disputed Diary Entry that are relevant to my conclusion that, applying these principles, the entry not only purports to state the testamentary intentions of Mr Shen, but also reflects Mr Shen’s intention that the document itself form his will.
There is some evidence that Mr Shen had some immediate concerns about his health when he wrote the entry in his diary. The entry itself records Mr Shen’s feelings of discomfort which he attributed to his heart. Mr Shen had also reported to Ms Wu on the evening of 23 May 2023 when she left him at Queens Road that he was feeling “uncomfortable”. This is recorded in the COPS entry made by police following their attendance at the Queens Road House on the night of 24 May 2023.
The proximity in time between the creation of the document and the death of the putative testator can be relevant to the assessment under s 8(2)(a), as can evidence of the state of mind of that person: Re Nicholls [1996] 1 Qd R 179 at 181-182; [1995] QSC 184; Application by Maggie Riman (Estate of Rita Riman) [2022] NSWSC 872 at [80].
These concerns provide some context for understanding why on the evening of 22 May 2023 Mr Shen sat down to record his testamentary intentions. The fact that he intended his written words to operate as an immediately effective statement of those intentions is reflected in the final words used in the entry:

As Ms Sanders submits, the final sentence signals Mr Shen’s clear intention that the written record was intended to be treated as itself being a statement of his testamentary wishes, and that the document would have a present operation as his will. That is the obvious significance of stating in terms that the words should “count as the will”.
The fact that Mr Shen contemplated a formal will being prepared at some later point does not detract from this conclusion. Mr Shen was evidently aware that there are formalities associated with wills and intended to attend to those, presumably with the assistance of a solicitor (as he had done in October 2021). He nevertheless intended that what he wrote would operate immediately “as the Will!”, in the sense that he intended his expression of testamentary wishes to be immediately effective. The situation is similar to that considered in Roggenkamp v Estate of Bowd (unreported, NSWSC, 11 August 1995) where Hodgson J was satisfied that the description of the document as an “Interim Will” did not detract from the conclusion that it expressed there was a present testamentary intention and an intention that the document would be the will of the deceased.
In Borthwick v Mitchell [2017] NSWSC 1145 at [82]-[87] (Borthwick) Ward CJ in Eq held that notes dictated by the deceased were intended to operate immediately as a “stopgap” will, pending the execution of a formal will. Although the deceased contemplated arranging for a solicitor or obtaining a will kit the following day, the urgency of recording his dispositions, his awareness of his serious condition, the proximity of his death and his lack of any subsequent opportunity to formalise them supported present testamentary operation.
In the case of Mr Shen’s diary entry, the intention that the document should on its own terms dictate the testamentary disposition is reinforced by the use of the language of inheritance (“60% of all my assets shall be inherited … The family trust shall be inherited”).
The use of these words is consistent with Mr Shen having contemplated that others may come to read his diary, in which case the entry could operate as a solemn statement of testamentary intentions. This makes that particular diary entry an outlier, given that Mr Shen otherwise appears to have treated the diary as a record only for his own consumption.
I also agree with the submission that by drawing a rectangular box around that part of the diary entry that recorded his intentions Mr Shen wished to emphasise the importance of what he was recording, including potentially for others who might come to read his diary after his death.
Ms Shen and Gordon raise a number of objections to the 2023 Informal Will being admitted to probate, even if the diary entry was made by Mr Shen. They argue that the translation of the relevant words creates relevant uncertainty in the meaning of the alleged will. Ms Shen and Gordon appear to rely on that argument as militating against a conclusion that the diary entry states the testamentary intentions of Mr Shen and was intended to form his will.
There are three different translations in evidence of the words that were included within the rectangular box by Mr Shen in the 2023 Informal Will. Unfortunately, the parties did not seek to resolve the differences between these versions by adducing evidence from the responsible translators, or from any of the interpreters used at the hearing. As it transpires, I regard the differences as immaterial. However, it would have been preferable for the parties to have addressed this issue squarely and precisely in the evidence, rather than leave the matter for closing submissions in circumstances where the Court has no opportunity to gauge if any particular translation should be treated as more accurate than any other.
The three versions of the 2023 Informal Will are as follows. Each is a certified translation prepared by a NAATI certified translator:
The version annexed to the affidavit of Ms Wu of 25 January 2024:

In the third translation, the translator added a note explaining that there is no singular or plural marking in the Chinese language and that the “(s)” in “person(s)” was inserted for that reason.
I reject the submission that there is a relevant divergence in meaning arising from the differences in these translations of the Disputed Diary Entry. I note that in the second translation there are not two references to “eldest nephew”, but rather one reference to “eldest nephew” and one reference to “first nephew”. I do not regard that as significant. Even if that translation is more accurate, I would not read that as a reliable indication that Mr Shen was referring to more than one person in those two references. The more natural reading, and the only reading that I regard as consistent with the text, is that he was indicating that the same person – that is, the eldest or first “nephew” – would inherit “the family trust” in addition to 60% of all of Mr Shen’s assets.
Under the heading for Issue 4, I address the issue of how to construe the gift of 40% to the last person caring for Mr Shen.
I am satisfied that the 2023 Informal Will purports to state the testamentary intentions of Mr Shen and was not executed in accordance with Pt 2.1. I am also satisfied that Mr Shen intended the document to form his will. This much is made plain by Mr Shen’s statement that the words recorded should count as his will (followed by an exclamation mark, which is something of a trademark of Mr Shen’s style of written communication). It may be accepted that, as Ms Shen and Gordon submit, s 8(2)(a) is not satisfied merely because a document records a person’s testamentary intentions. The document itself must be intended to operate as a testamentary act: Rodny v Weisbord at [106]. That is the case here.
For these reasons, notwithstanding the lack of formality, the 2023 Informal Will should be admitted to probate.
The 2023 Informal Will does not nominate an executor. That is not itself an impediment to a grant of probate, as s 8 does not require that a document must nominate an executor in order to be the subject of a grant of probate as an informal will: The Estate of Maureen Alicia Anderton; Edwards v Animal Welfare League [2025] NSWSC 703 at [104] (The Estate of Maureen Alicia Anderton). The absence of reference to an executor may nevertheless, in particular circumstances, be relevant to whether the document purports to state testamentary intentions for the purposes of s 8(1)(a): see Borthwick at [72].
Letters of administration may be granted to an appropriate person with the approved will attached: see, for example, The Estate of Maureen Alicia Anderton at [108]; Borthwick at [96]. The appropriate person to be appointed in the present case by such a process is addressed under the heading for Issue 7 below.

The object of the judicial inquiry is to ascertain what outcome the testator intended to achieve by using the words that he did in the will. Applying the “armchair principle”, the Court in deciphering the testator’s intentions may consider the circumstances existing at the time of the will and known to the testator: see Boyes v Cook (1880) 14 Ch D 53 at 56. This includes gaining an understanding from extrinsic evidence of how the testator used particular words and understood the context in which they were used: Middleton v Schofield [2022] NSWSC 1454 at [32]-[33] (Middleton v Schofield). Evidence allowed in accordance with the armchair principle may thereby establish that a testator used a word in a sense other than its natural meaning: Parry v Haisma [2012] NSWSC 290 at [55] (Parry). Evidence may also be adduced of the testator’s habits in referring to people by particular names: Parry at [10]-[11]; Grant v Grant (1870) LR 5 CP 380 at 388-390; Public Trustee of NSW v Herbert [2009] NSWSC 366 at [27]-[30].
At common law it is not necessary to find ambiguity before having regard to such evidence applying the armchair principle: Parry at [10]. Evidence of the facts and circumstances known to the testator at the time of making the will can be taken into account as contextual material in interpreting the language used in the will: King v Perpetual Trustee Co (Ltd) (1955) 94 CLR 70 at 78; [1955] HCA 70; James v Douglas [2016] NSWCA 178 at [19].
The key limitation on the use of extrinsic evidence is that the Court is concerned at all times with the testator’s expressed intentions. The Court does not search for what the testator subjectively intended, or what the Court thinks the testator meant to say, when making the will: Middleton v Schofield at [17]. The cardinal principle of construction is that the testator’s intention is to be derived from the meaning of the words actually used in the will: Carrington v Wallace [2019] NSWSC 1301 at [81].
Gordon contends that when Mr Shen referred to “the eldest nephew” in the 2023 Informal Will, his intention in doing so was to refer to Gordon. Ms Wu was neutral on this point. While she advanced some brief submissions on the topic, they were not directed to advocating for any particular outcome.
A relevant contextual consideration is the relationship between Mr Shen and Gordon. The evidence plainly supports the conclusion that Mr Shen had a close and loving relationship with Gordon for all of Gordon’s life, subject only to short periods of estrangement. Mr Shen looked after Gordon for much of his early life.
Ms Wu confirmed in her evidence that Mr Shen was very fond of Gordon. She said that Mr Shen intended to buy a property for Gordon (addressed in more detail below). Mr Shen did not take the same approach with his other grandchildren and he told Ms Wu that he was not close to them, including because they had been born after Ms Shen reunited with Lei Dang and were raised by Lei Dang’s mother. This evidence, which I accept, is consistent with other evidence about Mr Shen’s strong attachment to Gordon and his preferential treatment of Gordon.
Mr Shen’s diaries contain numerous references to Gordon. Mr Shen’s habit was to refer to Gordon by that name (being Gao Deng in Chinese) or as “the eldest” (being Lao Da in Chinese). Gordon appeared as a contact in Mr Shen’s WeChat app as “Gordon (eldest one)”.
I agree with the submission made by Mr Morahan that, notwithstanding bumpy periods in their relationship, Mr Shen held Gordon in high regard and considered him to be someone who could be trusted to manage assets and look after the family. Gordon recounted conversations on different occasions with Mr Shen in which Mr Shen emphasised the trust he placed in Gordon and his expectation that Gordon would look after his mother and younger siblings.
There is only limited evidence about the relationship between Haijun Zhou and Mr Shen. That appears to be a reflection of the fact that while they had a positive relationship, Haijun Zhou did not play a large role in Mr Shen’s life. According to Ms Wu, Mr Shen told her that Haijun Zhou was his nephew who lived in Japan. Mr Shen described him as a good man and the only family member who genuinely cared for him. Mr Shen had provided him with financial support over the years, including by paying for his tuition fees in Japan. Mr Shen also helped fund an Airbnb business that Haijun Zhou operated in Japan.
The question is whether, in referring to his “eldest nephew” in the 2023 Informal Will, Mr Shen intended to refer to Haijun Zhou or Gordon. It was not suggested that any third possibility arises, and I do not perceive the evidence as throwing up such alternative. The phrase “eldest nephew” appears twice in the short diary entry (the 2023 Informal Will), which is a strong indication that it was not a slip.
The use of the word “eldest” might be taken to indicate that Mr Shen was referring to Haijun Zhou in a descriptive way, in the sense of describing his status by age in comparison with other relatives. However, the word “eldest” was used routinely by Mr Shen in a somewhat honorific way, including in reference to Gordon. It would be equally apt to describe Haijun Zhou or Gordon. On its own it does not provide a clear answer to the question of which of the two people Mr Shen was referring to.
I do not give any weight to Gordon’s submissions that the words for “nephew” and “grandson” have the same pronunciation in Shanghainese. The issue at hand turns entirely on the meaning of words written by Mr Shen (and translated into English for the purposes of these proceedings), not spoken words. The point about potential confusion arising from the pronunciation of different words is a distraction.
The issue of critical significance is what Mr Shen intended to convey when he wrote the word which has been translated into English as “nephew”. There is evidence of Mr Shen using the written word meaning “nephew” in a way that does not accord with the usual Western usage. On 22 December 2022 Mr Shen sent a WeChat message to Gordon which read as follows:

Likewise in the present case, through the application of the armchair principle, extrinsic evidence makes clear that the apparently straightforward reference in the 2023 Informal Will to “my eldest nephew” is in fact ambiguous. I find that Mr Shen sometimes used the word “nephew” in a way that accords with the ordinary Western usage, but sometimes in a way that does not. The limited relationship that Mr Shen had with his nephew Haijun Zhou, as compared with his close relationship with Gordon Dang, is itself a reason to find ambiguity in the phrase “eldest nephew”, at least once it is appreciated that Mr Shen might use the phrase to refer to Gordon.
There is also statutory support for having regard to extrinsic evidence in these circumstances. If the language of a will is ambiguous, including in the light of surrounding circumstances, evidence is admissible under s 32 of the Succession Act to assist in the interpretation of that language. The exercise remains one of construction of the words used. Section 32 does not permit the Court to adopt a construction that is inconsistent with those words: Serwin v Dolso [2020] NSWSC 370; (2020) 19 ASTLR 208 at [65]-[67].
I accept Gordon’s submission that there is ambiguity in the language used in the 2023 Informal Will, in particular because it has been demonstrated from other evidence (which is not evidence of the testator’s intention: see s 32(2)) that Mr Shen was in the habit of using the word “nephew” in a manner that has a broader connotation that the conventional Western usage.
In addition, as Gordon submits, there is an ambiguity arising from the word “eldest”. Even if it could be assumed that the word “nephew” was unambiguous because it has a clear genealogical meaning, describing Mr Zhou as the “eldest” nephew introduces an ambiguity given that he appears to have been the only nephew of Mr Shen.
It may readily be accepted that the phrase is capable of being construed as a reference to Haijun Zhou. However, for the reasons already given, I do not regard that construction as determinative. Having regard to the ambiguity identified above, the phrase cannot be construed solely by reference to its conventional meaning.
Here the extrinsic evidence all points one way. Mr Shen had a strong and enduring relationship with Gordon. He had referred to him in the past using the word that is translated as “nephew”. That reflected a technical distinction, which was of considerable importance to Mr Shen, deriving from the fact that Gordon no longer used the surname “Shen”. Mr Shen was in the habit of using “eldest” in an honorific way, such that it would be a natural way of singling out Gordon rather than as a description of another unnamed person. In all the circumstances, I am satisfied that when Mr Shen referred to the “eldest nephew” in the 2023 Informal Will he was intending to refer to Gordon Dang.
I am also satisfied that this exercise of construing the 2023 Informal Will does not involve the illegitimate use of extrinsic evidence in a way that supplants the intentions expressed by the testator in favour of a disposition that the Court considers more appropriate based on the extrinsic evidence: see Middleton v Schofield at [35]-[37].
A further question concerns the effect of Mr Shen’s direction that “the family trust” be inherited by the eldest nephew. The SJP Family Trust was not itself an item of property owned by Mr Shen capable of transmission under his will. SJP (NSW) was the trustee of that trust and Mr Shen was the sole shareholder of SJP (NSW). In that context, I construe the reference to “the family trust” as a reference to Mr Shen’s shares in SJP (NSW). The separate and specific direction concerning “the family trust” is properly understood as qualifying the preceding general disposition of “all my assets”, with the result that the shares in SJP (NSW) fall outside the assets otherwise divided on a 60% and 40% basis.

There are two suggested points of ambiguity, if not invalidating uncertainty, in the words used by Mr Shen in the 2023 Informal Will to describe the intended beneficiary or beneficiaries of 40% of his estate.
One is temporal. Do those words describe a person (or persons) fitting that description at the time of the will, or a person (or persons) who would fit that description at the time of Mr Shen’s death? According to the submissions of Ms Shen and Gordon, ambiguity arises because Mandarin verbs ordinarily do not change form to mark tense in the way required by English grammar. Temporal reference may instead be derived from time expressions, aspect, the surrounding text and the context.
The second concerns whether the words describe a single person or potentially more than one person.
As to the temporal issue, I consider it clear that Mr Shen was intending to describe a future status, being the status of the carer for Mr Shen at the time of his death. One relevant contextual indication is the fact that Mr Shen chose to use words of description rather than identify a beneficiary by name. I infer, based on the factual findings set out elsewhere in these reasons, that if Mr Shen was meaning to identify the person who on 22 May 2023 was providing him with care he would have had no hesitation in naming Ms Wu as the person, and the only person, fitting that description. That would have been a simple and clear way of achieving that outcome, had that been his intention. The fact that he chose to instead adopt words of description is a strong indication that Mr Shen was intending to describe a future status, which might or might not ultimately apply to Ms Wu.
As to the words of description, while there is some slight divergence between the three English translations of the words used by Mr Shen to describe the intended recipient of 40% of his assets, in each translation the words plainly signify a future state of affairs. On one version, the words used by Mr Shen translate as “the last person(s) taking care of myself”. To similar effect, another translation is “the person who takes care of me last”. The third translation of the phrase is “the person(s) who will be caring for me in the final [stretch]”. In each case there is a point of future reference which in context must be Mr Shen’s death (i.e. “last” or “in the final [stretch]”). The natural meaning in each case is to describe a person (or potentially persons) who will prove in time to be Mr Shen’s final carer at some unknown point in the future. Unfortunately for Mr Shen, that was a matter of only two days away.
Ms Shen and Gordon separately submitted that in relation to the 40% share of Mr Shen’s assets the 2023 Informal Will contained no final statement of testamentary intention, but instead merely a provisional statement about what the testator might in the future decide regarding the disposition of that share of his estate. I reject that submission. Mr Shen was plainly intending to state how all of his assets should be disposed of. In relation to the 40% share, he gave a complete description of the intended recipient that would be enlivened upon his death. Nothing further was required on his part, such as to convert a mere provisional indication to a statement of testamentary intention.
As to the question of whether the words signify a person or persons, the parties agreed that in Mandarin there is a lack of specificity in the corresponding characters as to whether this must necessarily mean a single person, or potentially more than one person. In my view, the more natural conclusion is that Mr Shen was intending to describe a relationship of close care and responsibility for his affairs that is bound to involve a relationship with a particular person, rather than multiple people.
Applying the “armchair principle”, as alluded to above I infer that at the time of writing these words Mr Shen would have had in mind Ms Wu, on the basis that she was in fact the person fulfilling that role as at May 2023. But his intention was to maintain some flexibility as his circumstances might change. Against the possibility that Ms Wu might not continue to be his carer and some other person would assume that role, he chose to use a de-personalised descriptor when expressing his testamentary intentions.
That is also consistent with the way Mr Shen had, in his conferral with Mr Ying on 6 October 2021, justified his choice of Ms Wu as a beneficiary and an executor in the 2021 Will. He explained that Ms Wu was the person looking after him and who had earned his trust and gratitude for that reason.
Mr Shen emphasised the same priorities in the WeChat message to his friend Haoguan Wu just eight days before he made the 2023 Informal Will. There he said that in his will he would specify that his estate would go to “the person who gives me care and respect in my final days”.

Ms Shen and Gordon submit that Ms Wu has not established that, as at 24 May 2023, she was the last person caring for Mr Shen.
I reject that submission. I have set out above my findings as to the nature of the relationship between Ms Wu and Mr Shen. There is no doubt that Ms Wu fits the description of the last person who cared for Mr Shen. That description would have applied to Ms Wu for at least two years prior to Mr Shen’s death. Indeed Mr Shen had used language of a very similar kind to describe Ms Wu on multiple occasions, including when he instructed Mr Ying to prepare the 2021 Will on 6 October 2021.
In essentially all aspects of his life, Mr Shen was attended to and assisted by Ms Wu in the years before his death. In terms of daily domestic requirements, Ms Wu did the shopping, cooking, laundry and cleaning. In terms of his personal and business affairs, Ms Wu assisted with banking, the payment of bills, the translation of documents, inspection of real estate, attendance at meetings and correspondence. She assumed responsibility for Mr Shen’s move between Blakehurst and the Queens Road House. In terms of Mr Shen’s health needs, Ms Wu collected medications, organised for the supply and installation of medical support equipment (including a stairlift and oxygen machine), and accompanied Mr Shen to medical appointments and the hospital when required (for both scheduled and unscheduled visits).
As Ms Sanders correctly submits, there was no other person in Mr Shen’s life in the years from 2020 onwards who could even arguably have been described as a person, let alone the person, who took care of him.
Ms Shen and Gordon concede that there is some evidence of Ms Wu providing domestic and personal assistance to Mr Shen. However, they say that the extent of this assistance has been significantly overstated by Ms Wu and that it was primarily concentrated in the years closer to Mr Shen’s death.
I do not accept the submission that Ms Wu has overstated the extent of the domestic and personal assistance that she provided to Mr Shen. There is extensive evidence from a variety of sources, most or all of which is unchallenged, demonstrating that in every relevant aspect of his life Mr Shen had come to rely on Ms Wu to provide care and support. That is reflected in Mr Shen’s own statements about his dependence on Ms Wu and his desire for her to keep caring for him.
It is broadly true, as Mr Morahan submitted, that the evidence is largely directed to the years immediately before Mr Shen’s death. As Ms Wu described it, accurately in my view, the relationship became increasingly close from 2019 onwards, and particularly from mid-2020. Mr Shen’s dependence on Ms Wu for care and support intensified over time, as their lives became increasingly intertwined and his estrangement from his own family left him more in need of care and support. None of that detracts from the conclusion that Ms Wu was the last person caring for Mr Shen at the time of his death. It cannot be suggested that this was merely a passing arrangement that happened to coincide with the timing of Mr Shen’s death. Even on the narrowest interpretation of the evidence, for a matter of years Ms Wu had assumed the primary responsibility for caring for Mr Shen.
I am satisfied that the phrase, the subject of issue 4, is not uncertain and find that Ms Wu is the person, and the only person, who qualifies for Mr Shen’s bequest to the last person taking care of him.

In light of my conclusion that the 2023 Informal Will was made by Mr Shen and should be admitted to probate, issue 5 arises only in the alternative.
As noted above, Ms Shen and Gordon initially disputed the authenticity of the copy of the 2021 Will. That issue fell away in closing address, with Mr Morahan accepting that the evidence established that Mr Shen did make the 2021 Will, in the form now reproduced as a copy from the records of STC Lawyers.
The remaining issue is whether the 2021 Will can be admitted to probate, notwithstanding that the original of the 2021 Will has not been found.
In such circumstances, five matters must be established before a grant of probate may be made in respect of the lost will. The five matters were set out by Campbell J in Cahill v Rhodes [2002] NSWSC 561 at [55] (Cahill v Rhodes):
there actually was a will, or a document purporting to embody the testamentary intentions of a deceased person;
the document in question revoked all previous wills;
the presumption that when a will is not produced it has been destroyed must be overcome;
there is evidence of the terms of the will; and
there is evidence of due execution or that the deceased person intended the document to constitute his or her will.
Notwithstanding the statutory adjustments that have been made since Cahill v Rhodes was decided, these principles remain relevant: Bear v Bear, Jordan v Bear [2022] NSWSC 1687 at [193] (Bear).
There is no difficulty in the present case about issues one, two, four or five. The evidence of Mr Ying and Ms Yin establishes that the document that is in evidence as a copy of the 2021 Will is a true copy of the document executed by Mr Shen in October 2021. The copy demonstrates that there was a will that recorded the testamentary intentions of Mr Shen. That will revoked all previous wills (by cl 1). There is complete evidence of the terms of the will and it was duly executed. The only controversial issue concerns the presumption of revocation.

There is no evidence of any conscious act of revocation of the 2021 Will by Mr Shen, whether by destruction or otherwise. Mr Morahan seeks to draw in aid evidence after October 2021 indicating that Mr Shen thought he needed to make a will. For example, around February 2022 (after Mr Shen had moved to Queens Road) Mr Qiang Li had a conversation with Mr Shen concerning his intention to be buried in Australia and Mr Li told him he needed to make a will. Mr Shen’s response was to say “Yes, indeed. I plan to do it”. Mr Morahan submits that comments of that kind are consistent with Mr Shen having revoked the 2021 Will by destroying it.
I do not accept the submission that the words attributed to Mr Shen have this effect. On its face, Mr Shen’s comment is enigmatic in circumstances where it has been shown that Mr Shen did make a will in October 2021 and, given his firm grasp of his affairs, he is unlikely to have forgotten doing so. Comments of this kind can be construed as implying that Mr Shen had never had a will, but that is not a rational inference to draw given what has been shown about what did occur in October 2021. Other explanations are available for such comments. They are consistent with Mr Shen concluding that he needed to make a new will, even while appreciating that he had made a previous will. They are also consistent with Mr Shen wishing to be coy with others about whether he already had a will in place. They are also logically consistent with Mr Shen having made a conscious decision to revoke the 2021 Will. However, none of the exchanges on this topic involved Mr Shen acknowledging having had a will in the past, which he had since destroyed and revoked.
I infer that, on the balance of probabilities, Mr Shen kept the 2021 Will at his house in his locked filing cabinet. Ms Wu gave unchallenged evidence that Mr Shen kept all his important personal papers in the filing cabinet. Ms Shen’s evidence effectively corroborates Ms Wu’s evidence that this was the practice of Mr Shen. Ms Shen said that she retrieved documents from the filing cabinet after Mr Shen’s death, including his diary.
I am also satisfied that the facts established by the evidence, and the inferences I draw from those facts, raise a higher degree of probability that the loss of the original of the 2021 Will is attributable to causes other than Mr Shen having destroyed it with an intention to revoke it.
Ms Wu’s unchallenged evidence, to the effect that the filing cabinet was empty when she saw it on 25 May 2023, establishes that whatever was held in the filing cabinet was removed. This is consistent with the evidence of Ms Shen and Gordon, the effect of which is to confirm that together with Lei Dang they removed the contents of the filing cabinet. It follows that if the original of the 2021 Will remained in the possession of Mr Shen at the time of his death it was removed from his filing cabinet, which would explain why it could not be found by Ms Wu or others acting on her behalf.
Ms Shen did not give evidence detailing all of the documents that she took from the filing cabinet, aside from indicating that she took possession of the diary notebook. Ms Shen was silent as to whether she found an original of the 2021 Will among those papers. It was not put to Ms Shen that she took possession of that document. This leaves something of a lacuna in the evidence regarding the nature of the documents taken from the filing cabinet.
The direct evidence about Mr Shen’s record-keeping and the actions of Ms Shen in removing the contents of his filing cabinet point to a realistic alternative explanation of why the original of the 2021 Will cannot now be located, namely that Mr Shen kept the document in his filing cabinet and it was removed after his death. I am satisfied that in those circumstances the presumption that the will was revoked by destruction has been rebutted.
If I had concluded that it was not appropriate, for whatever reason, to grant probate in respect of the 2023 Informal Will, I would have granted probate in respect of the 2021 Will.

Consistently with these principles, Mr Morahan accepted that two people could be in a relationship as a couple living together, within the meaning of s 21C, even if they maintained separate residences at least some of the time. He nevertheless submitted that the weight of factors considered as a whole pointed against a conclusion that there was such a relationship that existed on a continuous basis for two years.
I have set out elsewhere in these reasons my factual findings about the nature of the relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu. Applying those findings to the various criteria in s 21C(3), I make the following additional findings about the character of the relationship that existed:
the duration of the relationship (s 21C(3)(a)) – Mr Shen and Ms Wu were in a close and intimate relationship from 2019 until Mr Shen’s death in May 2023. Their lives became increasingly intertwined, and from late 2020 Ms Wu spent more time sleeping at Mr Shen’s house (first in Blakehurst and then in Connells Point);
the nature and extent of their common residence (s 21C(3)(b)) – Ms Wu started sleeping at Mr Shen’s house on a regular basis in Blakehurst in 2020. She gradually increased the number of nights that she slept at Mr Shen’s house, although she continued to divide her time between his property and her mother’s. Eventually Ms Wu was spending the majority of her nights at Mr Shen’s house. Particularly once Mr Shen moved to the Queens Road House, Ms Wu assumed the main responsibility for managing their shared residence;
whether a sexual relationship exists (s 21C(3)(c)) – for reasons given earlier, I infer that a sexual relationship existed between Mr Shen and Ms Wu from 2019 onwards;
the degree of financial dependence or interdependence, and any arrangements for financial support, between them (s 21C(3)(d)) – as Mr Morahan correctly submits, Ms Wu and Mr Shen did not combine their finances, assume joint responsibilities or reach a point of financial dependence on each other. Mr Shen continued to exert close supervision over his finances, even though he was a generous man. However, that needs to be understood in a context where each was in a financially comfortable position and in fact Mr Shen had large amounts of money at his disposal. Even if Ms Wu was not dependent on Mr Shen financially, she did receive financial benefits from him and there was an increasing intertwining of financial affairs between Mr Shen and Ms Wu. Ms Wu provided regular assistance to Mr Shen with his banking and in paying for goods and services for him, and for the benefit of both of them. I agree with the submission of Ms Sanders that Mr Shen conducted his financial affairs in a way that showed implicit trust in Ms Wu. He regularly provided her with large amounts of money to support Ms Wu and her family. He purchased a car for Ms Wu. He also relied on her to spend money on his behalf, for which he would reimburse her;
the ownership, use and acquisition of property (s 21C(3)(e)) – Mr Shen acquired the Queens Road Property in his own name, but for the combined use of himself and Ms Wu. He was content for Ms Wu to use his properties at Blakehurst and Queens Road for her own domestic purposes throughout 2020 to 2023. As explained further below, Mr Shen and Ms Wu together arranged for the acquisition of the Harrington Street Property, on the basis that it would be owned by Ms Wu through a corporate ownership arrangement;
the degree of mutual commitment to a shared life (s 21C(3)(f)) – the evidence indicates that Mr Shen and Ms Wu shared their lives, and planned for the sharing of their lives, in significant respects including through their domestic arrangements, celebration of holidays, and engagement with Ms Wu’s family. I reject the submission made by Ms Shen and Gordon that the only evidence along these lines came from Ms Wu. The mutual commitment by Mr Shen and Ms Wu to a shared life is reflected in evidence from a variety of sources, including Mr Shen’s own communications, about their activities and their characterisation of their lives and attitudes to the future. Further the fact that Mr Shen may have engaged in flirtatious or other communications with another person does not, of itself, negate the existence of a mutual commitment to a shared life for the purposes of s 21C(3)(f). Entire fidelity or entire commitment is not required: Sadiq v NSW Trustee and Guardian [2015] NSWSC 716 at [205] (appeal dismissed: Sadiq v NSW Trustee and Guardian [2016] NSWCA 62);
the care and support of children (s 21C(3)(g)) – Mr Shen and Ms Wu did not have children together and both Mr Shen and Ms Wu’s children were adults by the time of the relationship. It is nevertheless instructive to consider the relationship of care and support that developed between Mr Shen and Ms Wu’s children. Mr Shen took a close interest in Ms Wu’s children, notwithstanding that they were adults. He offered substantial financial support to them (which was largely declined), and encouraged them to think of him in a familial sense;
the performance of household duties (s 21C(3)(h)) – Ms Wu assumed responsibility for the performance of essentially all household duties, including to assist Mr Shen. The various dimensions of this arrangement have been considered above. This was the case at both the Blakehurst house and the Queens Road House;
the reputation and public aspects of the relationship (s 21C(3)(i)) – Mr Morahan sought to emphasise that there was a clandestine element to the relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu when it started, including because Mr Shen was still married to Ms Guo. However, it is clear that the relationship did not remain clandestine for any sustained period. Particularly once Ms Guo was no longer in Australia Mr Shen and Ms Wu lived openly as a couple, with each of them introducing each other to friends, colleagues and family as being romantic companions of each other.
As made clear in s 21C(3) itself, no particular finding framed in terms of those criteria is essential or decisive to the ultimate issue. The analysis is multifactorial and individual factors may point one way or another, or may be relatively neutral. In the present case, however, all of these considerations point one way. Mr Shen and Ms Wu were in a “relationship as a couple living together”, for the purposes of s 21C of the Interpretation Act. The relationship had that character prior to May 2021. It continued through to Mr Shen’s death.
I reject Mr Morahan’s submission that the evidence as a whole merely indicates a relationship of friendship and practical assistance. That significantly understates the effect of the evidence and the nature of the relationship.
I am therefore satisfied that, applying the relevant statutory test, Ms Wu was in a de facto relationship with Mr Shen. That relationship existed for a continuous period of more than two years up to Mr Shen’s death.

Issue 7 as formulated by the parties was predicated on a finding of intestacy. I have concluded that Mr Shen did not die intestate. If I am wrong in that conclusion, in light of my findings in respect of issue 6 Ms Shen and Ms Wu are entitled to share in the estate.
Given my conclusion that there should be a grant of probate to administer the 2023 Informal Will, it is necessary to appoint an administrator to perform that administration.
Each of Ms Wu and Ms Shen put themselves forward as potential administrators. It would not be appropriate to appoint either Ms Wu or Ms Shen. They have been in a state of intractable conflict for a prolonged period. A significant feature of the administration is likely to be the investigation of how the assets of the estate in both China and Australia have been dealt with since Mr Shen’s death. That is likely to be a matter of controversy, given the steps that Ms Shen has taken, particularly in China, to transfer various assets. Ms Shen is in a position of conflict in this regard, as Mr Morahan accepted. Ms Wu is not well placed to deal with these issues in a manner that is appropriately dispassionate and detached.
The more appropriate course is to appoint a neutral person, ideally an appropriately qualified professional, to administer the estate. No such alternative has yet been identified. I agree with the submission of Ms Sanders that it would be preferable to select an administrator who can communicate in Mandarin, if that is a practical possibility.
It is possible that, despite indications to the contrary thus far, Ms Ross-Maranik may be suitable and willing to accept an appointment. Her appointment as interim administrator will come to an end upon the resolution of these proceedings. Although Ms Ross-Maranik indicated that she did not consider it appropriate to extend her interim appointment, that appears to have been at least in part influenced by her understanding that Chinese law did not recognise the status of an interim administrator. As that would not be a difficulty in the case of an unqualified appointment to administer the estate, Ms Ross-Maranik may be willing to reconsider her position.
I will make directions for the parties to confer about the identification of an appropriate administrator with no personal connection to any of the parties, with a view to making orders by consent or following argument about proposed options if not agreed.
It follows that Ms Wu’s primary claim succeeds, save that she will not herself be appointed to administer the estate. Ms Wu’s alternative claims, premised on the 2021 Will or intestacy do not arise (although I have determined above the issues that would arise in the alternative if I am wrong on my primary conclusions).

It is convenient to deal with issues 1 and 2 in the Company Proceedings together.
The parties made reference to a number of conflicting indications in the evidence about Mr Shen’s intentions as to the future use and ownership of the Harrington Street Property. Some of that evidence predates the acquisition and some postdates it. The parties placed particular emphasis on the dispute over the beneficial ownership of the funds used to purchase the Harrington Street Property, on the basis that this was the most decisive indication of the beneficial ownership of the Harrington Street Property.
Ms Shen, Gordon and SJP (NSW) argue that Mr Shen did not intend, when buying the Harrington Street Property and arranging the funds for that purchase, for the property to be owned legally and beneficially by SJP (Australia). Beyond that negative proposition, there is some imprecision in how Ms Shen, Gordon and SJP (NSW) argue the transaction should be characterised. They place reliance on the fact that funds for the purchase of the Harrington Street Property came from the bank account of SJP (NSW), in aid of a submission that Mr Shen intended that SJP (NSW) would acquire the Harrington Street Property as trustee under the terms of the SJP Family Trust. On that basis Ms Shen, Gordon and SJP (NSW) say that the property was held on trust for SJP (NSW) and the same is now true of the proceeds of sale. On the other hand, they also point to evidence suggesting that Mr Shen intended to acquire the property for Gordon personally.
The submissions of Ms Shen, Gordon and SJP (NSW) did not explore in any detail how these two propositions can be reconciled. One possibility, which was not developed in submissions, is that the property was intended to become trust property, but with a view to Gordon being permitted to use or occupy the property as a beneficiary, and/or ultimately acquiring the property by way of a distribution from SJP (NSW).
As to the ultimate conclusions that should be drawn, Mr Morahan submitted that SJP (NSW), in its capacity as trustee of the SJP Family Trust, provided the purchase money from its own funds and retained the beneficial interest in the Harrington Street Property. If, in the alternative, the funds in question were the beneficial property of Mr Shen and not SJP (NSW), Mr Shen acquired the beneficial interest in the Harrington Street Property, which in turn means that the estate held that interest upon Mr Shen’s death.
SJP (Australia) submits that Mr Shen’s intention, in contributing his personal funds to acquire the Harrington Street Property, was for SJP (Australia) to become the legal and beneficial owner of the property. That was, according to SJP (Australia), the means by which Mr Shen intended to give effect to his wish to gift the unit to Ms Wu for her benefit. SJP (Australia) submits that Mr Shen only transferred funds into the account of SJP (NSW) to “park” those funds there temporarily. The funds were always earmarked for the acquisition of the Harrington Street Property, but not as an asset to be acquired by or for SJP (NSW). SJP (Australia) argues that Mr Shen adopted this approach because he was concerned about Ms Shen making a claim on his assets and/or seeking a freezing order over his assets, and the account of SJP (NSW) was perceived as a temporary safe haven for the funds.
It was common ground between the parties that in circumstances where the Harrington Street Property was sold after Mr Shen’s death, the beneficial entitlement to the proceeds of sale is to be determined by reference to the beneficial ownership of the property.

One common thread is that the parties proceeded on the basis that the issue turned on Mr Shen’s intentions at the time of the purchase of the Harrington Street Property. While the parties did not address the underlying principles informing this approach, I accept that in substance it is appropriate.
Mr Shen’s intention, both in his personal capacity and office holder of SJP (NSW), objectively ascertained, is critical when it comes to characterising the nature and purpose of two separate but related transactions. The first is the transfer of funds from Mr Shen to the bank account of SJP (NSW). The second is the transfer of funds from the bank account of SJP (NSW) to the relevant PEXA account for the purposes of SJP (Australia) acquiring the Harrington Street Property.
As to the first of those transactions, as reflected in the formulation of Issue 1, one possibility is that Mr Shen intended to confer the funds on SJP (NSW) subject to a bare trust, such that Mr Shen retained beneficial ownership of the funds and was entitled to require the return of the funds to him (or to direct the dispersal of the funds to someone else at his direction). The alternative possibility is that he intended to give the funds legally and beneficially to SJP (NSW), on the basis that SJP (NSW) would hold the funds on the terms of the SJP Family Trust.
As to the second transaction, in circumstances where SJP (Australia) acquired the Harrington Street Property using funds provided by SJP (NSW) the question arises as to whether SJP (Australia) holds the property subject to a resulting trust in favour of SJP (NSW). In that scenario, SJP (NSW) would itself hold that interest in the Harrington Street Property on the terms of the SJP Family Trust, if the funds in question were funds of that trust. That would not be the case, however, if the evidence establishes that SJP (NSW) intended that SJP (Australia) would acquire the property legally and beneficially.
The provision of funds from the account of SJP (NSW) to facilitate the acquisition of the Harrington Street Property enlivens a presumption that SJP (Australia) as the legal owner, holds the property on a resulting trust for SJP (NSW). That presumption would be negated if the intention of SJP (NSW) in providing the funds was that SJP (Australia) would acquire legal and beneficial title to the property: Bosanac v Commissioner of Taxation (2022) 275 CLR 37; [2022] HCA 34 at [13] (Bosanac).
The relevant intention is that of the party providing the purchase funds and ascertaining that intention is a question of fact: Bosanac at [32] per Kiefel CJ and Gleeson J. Inferences are to be drawn as with any question of fact on the balance of probabilities, considering the totality of the circumstances: Bosanac at [67] per Gageler J. The Court’s concern is with the objectively manifested intention of the relevant party on the whole of the evidence: Bosanac at [13] per Kiefel CJ and Gleeson J; [105], [111] and [113] per Gordon and Edelman JJ. It is to be established by reference to the time of purchase, established principally by acts and declarations before, at or so immediately after the transaction as to form part of it: Bosanac at [113]. Facts and circumstances surrounding the acquisition (including those immediately following it) may support inferences as to the intention of the party providing the funds: Koprivnjak v Koprivnjak [2023] NSWCA 2 at [19], summarising Amit Laundry Pty Ltd v Jain [2017] NSWSC 1495 at [161]-[168].
In Li v Ye [2025] NSWCA 227 Kirk JA (with whom Mitchelmore JA agreed) said the following about resulting trusts, at [37]-[38]:

A relevant contextual consideration is how Mr Shen otherwise dealt with SJP (NSW) and engaged in transactions through and involving that entity. There was documentary and affidavit evidence before the Court of a previous purchase of property by SJP (NSW) which was undoubtedly intended to be held on trust pursuant to the SJP Family Trust. On 3 May 2021 Mr Shen signed a contract in his capacity as sole director of SJP (NSW) for the purchase of a property at XXX Treacy Street Hurstville. The contract of sale describes the purchaser as SJP (NSW) “as trustee for S.JP (NSW) Family Trust”.
Bing Wang, who acted as a real estate agent for Mr Shen in relation to a number of transactions, gave unchallenged evidence about the acquisition of the unit at Treacy Street Hurstville. Mr Shen told Ms Wang that he wished to acquire the unit for investment and wished to purchase it through the SJP Family Trust, as his plan was to spend all the money in the trust and convert it into real estate assets. There was a further conversation some days later after Mr Shen confirmed his desire to purchase the property, and to do so through the SJP Family Trust. Mr Shen provided the details of SJP (NSW), confirming that he wished it to become the owner. SJP (NSW) used the conveyancing services of Mr Ying of STC Lawyers.
The sale was subsequently completed after Mr Shen’s death by the interim administrator, Ms Ross-Maranik.
The increasing animosity between Mr Shen and Ms Shen had implications for the SJP Family Trust. Mr Shen commenced proceedings against Ms Shen and Lei Dang in January 2022. As explained further below, in August 2022 Ms Shen and Lei Dang made claims against half of Mr Shen’s assets and he became apprehensive about those claims and the threat of a freezing order over his assets. Ms Wu gave evidence, which was not challenged and which I accept, that after this occurred Mr Shen said that he intended to set up a new trust and he did not want anything to do with Ms Shen anymore.
Ms Sanders submits that the evidence demonstrates that Mr Shen was in the habit of using funds held in the bank account of SJP (NSW) for purposes that were apparently personal and not pursuant to the terms of the SJP Family Trust. The submission, which I accept as being broadly accurate, is that Mr Shen treated the funds of SJP (NSW) as essentially being his to deal with as he saw fit, without regard to the limitations that arose from SJP (NSW), being the trustee of the SJP Family Trust.
The account statements for the period 16 May 2022 to 16 August 2023 were in evidence. Those statements show a number of substantial payments that, at least on their face, do not appear to have been for trust purposes. On 17 May 2022, $58,508 was paid to the Jurisbridge Legal Law Practice Trust. There is no evidence that SJP (NSW), as opposed to Mr Shen personally, was involved in legal matters at that time occasioning such fees. There is no indication in the evidence of any resolutions by SJP (NSW) authorising dispersal of funds and reflecting a determination that the payments were made under the terms of the SJP Family Trust. Potentially transfers made to discharge the debts of Mr Shen might have been thought to be authorised under the terms of the SJP Family Trust, but there is no indication that this was a matter that was considered.
Other transactions appear more clearly to fall outside the terms of the trust. There are a number of instances of payments to Ms Wu. On 25 July 2022, $1,680 was transferred from the account of SJP (NSW) to Ms Wu’s account. On 15 September 2022, $6,680 was transferred from the account to Ms Wu. On 1 February 2023, $10,000 was transferred to the account of Ms Wu. Ms Wu was not a beneficiary under the SJP Family Trust.
On 13 September 2022, $18,375 was paid from the account of SJP (NSW) to a BPAY account associated with UNSW. I infer that this was a payment to benefit Tony, the visiting Chinese student. There is a reference in Mr Shen’s diary to Tony’s tuition fee being $18,000. Likewise on 9 February 2023, $19,098.50 was paid from the account of SJP (NSW) to the UNSW BPAY account. There is a corresponding reference in Mr Shen’s diary to Tony having a tuition fee of $19,000. Tony was not a beneficiary under the SJP Family Trust.
On 8 November 2022, $20,000 was paid from SJP (NSW) to Lifeng Ji. Mr Ji was described by Mr Shen in a 2020 police statement as his stepson. He was not a beneficiary under the SJP Family Trust.
There is no evidence of surrounding context to explain most of these transactions. However, they provide a sufficient basis to infer that Mr Shen tended to use the funds held by SJP (NSW) to his own ends, without careful attention to the role of SJP (NSW) as trustee or to the terms of the SJP Family Trust.
In circumstances where there is more direct evidence of Mr Shen’s intentions surrounding the relevant transactions, this is not a particular weighty consideration. It does however assist in the sense of dispelling the inference that might otherwise be drawn that when Mr Shen chose to put funds into the account of SJP (NSW) he must have intended that they would be held by SJP (NSW) on the terms of the SJP Family Trust and would only be used for the purposes of that trust.

The evidence indicates that Mr Shen was looking for an apartment in the city to buy from at least April 2022. Mr Shen’s diary entry for 18 April 2022 records that Mr Shen had gone to the city “to see a house on the 35th floor with a price of 220 yuan”. It is unclear if this is the same proposed acquisition that led to the purchase of the Harrington Street Property.
On Ms Wu’s account, Mr Shen raised the topic of getting a unit in the city for their use for weekend getaways in July 2022. Mr Shen and Ms Wu inspected a number of properties in the city that month. On about 31 July 2022 Mr Shen told Ms Wu that he wanted to buy the apartment for her, to give her some security. He told her that she could put the property in her name, or under the name of a company if that is what she wanted. Ms Wu said that they could set up a company together, and Mr Shen suggested using “SJP” which was an abbreviation of his name. Ms Wu did some searches and found that SJP (Australia) was available. Ms Wu asked him how she should allocate the shares and Mr Shen said it was a matter for Ms Wu.
Ms Wu and Mr Shen inspected the Harrington Street Property around 19 August 2022. They both liked the apartment and discussed using it on weekends. They agreed to purchase the property for $1.93 million and paid a holding deposit. There was an issue raised in the evidence and in written closing submissions about whether Mr Shen was aware of the purchase price but in oral closing submissions that issue was not ultimately pressed. For completeness, I do not consider that the conclusions I have reached about Mr Shen’s intentions in providing funds to acquire the Harrington Street Property would be affected even if it was the case that Mr Shen thought the purchase price was $1.98m rather than $1.93m.
Ms Wu’s evidence was that on 21 August 2022 Mr Shen told her that she should “go ahead with the purchase with our new company”.
Ms Wu had discussions with her children in the ensuing days about taking shares in SJP (Australia). They both declined the offer of shares. I infer that her children did not know that they were the shareholders of SJP (Australia), when it was first registered, holding 50% of the shares each. When Ms Wu explained to Mr Shen that the children did not wish to own shares he reiterated that he was gifting the property to Ms Wu and it was her call, but he desired 10% of the shares in the company. He also said that when they weren’t using the property he wanted Gordon or other friends of his to be able to use it. Ms Wu in response agreed about others using the property and said that Mr Shen should have 20% of the shares. She then arranged to have the shareholdings previously held by her children to be transferred to herself and Mr Shen. Shortly after Mr Shen’s death, his 20% shareholding was transferred to Ms Wu. On 16 August 2023, following legal advice, Ms Wu transferred 20% of the shareholding back to Mr Shen’s estate.
Putting aside the 20% shareholding in SJP (Australia), none of the parties suggested that Mr Shen’s estate retained a direct part interest in the Harrington Street Property, or is now entitled to part of the proceeds of sale. The parties addressed the Company Proceedings on the premise that the property was either wholly owned by SJP (Australia) or wholly owned by SJP (NSW) (either on the terms of the SJP Family Trust or possibly on trust for Gordon). That is consistent with the fact that the issue arises in the context of a statement of claim filed by SJP (NSW) which asserts, in substance, full ownership of the Harrington Street Property, and now the proceeds of sale of that property, with no alternative relief sought in respect of parts only of the property.
On 26 August 2022 Ms Wu, in her capacity as sole director and shareholder of SJP (Australia) signed the contract to purchase the Harrington Street Property. This was done in the presence of both Mr Ying and Mr Shen. The deposit payable was $96,500 (being 5% of the purchase price).
Funds required to pay that deposit came from a number of sources. On 26 August 2022 Ms Wu contributed $26,500 of her own. $30,000 was sourced from Rongrong Wu, Ms Wu’s mother. Ms Wu says that this was because there was a daily limit on how much she could transfer from her own account. Mr Shen transferred $40,000 to the trust account of the vendor’s solicitor likely from the Westpac bank account of SJP (NSW). On the same day, he also transferred $59,000 to Ms Wu from the Westpac bank account of SJP (NSW). I infer that the transfer of $59,000 to Ms Wu was to reimburse her the deposit amount.
Ms Wu gave evidence that this was consistent with the intended arrangement with Mr Shen, which was that she would contribute some of the deposit but be reimbursed by Mr Shen.
While the purchase process was happening, there were parallel activities concerning the ongoing litigation between Mr Shen, on the one hand, and Ms Shen and Lei Dang on the other. A mediation was held on 26 August 2022 which failed to resolve the dispute. A few days later Mr Ying reported that he had received a call from Lei Dang in which Lei Dang said that he would be claiming half of Mr Shen’s assets. Ms Wu’s evidence, which I accept, was that following the mediation Mr Shen had and expressed a particular concern that Ms Shen might make a claim against his assets more generally and that this could lead to his assets being frozen. He stated an intention to set up a new trust, as he wanted nothing to do with Ms Shen anymore.
Mr Shen and Ms Wu were also notified that the solicitors for Ms Shen had indicated an intention to file a cross-claim against Mr Shen seeking half of his assets in Australia. Mr Shen reiterated to Ms Wu his concern about having his assets and accounts frozen, as they had been during a previous family law dispute. He said that he would move his money into the trust account.
On 1 September 2022 $200,000 was transferred from Mr Shen’s personal account to the account of SJP (NSW). On 2 September 2022 Mr Shen visited the NAB branch at Hurstville and transferred $2,290,000 from his personal account into the bank account of SJP (NSW). This transaction is recorded in the bank records of SJP (NSW). Mr Shen called Ms Wu and told her that he had done this, and it was to keep his money safe.
The amounts transferred by Mr Shen tend to corroborate the explanation that Mr Shen was looking to secure his personal funds by putting them into the bank account of SJP (NSW), as opposed to transferring the funds to be held by SJP (NSW) as trustee of the SJP Family Trust. Mr Shen transferred almost $2.5m in two days. That significantly exceeds the amount that would be required a fortnight later to settle the acquisition of the Harrington Street Property. There is no indication that SJP (NSW) required the funds for any other purpose, including for the purposes of distribution to beneficiaries under the terms of the SJP Family Trust.
On 16 September 2022 Ms Wu and Mr Shen together attended the Hurstville Branch of Westpac and organised for $1,927,939.97 to be paid into the relevant PEXA account to facilitate settlement of the purchase of the Harrington Street Property. This amount was transferred from the bank account of SJP (NSW). The amount comprised the balance of the purchase price, stamp duty and other fees and adjustments.
Settlement occurred on 20 September 2022.

These words were accompanied by three emojis – 😍🌹❤️.
Ms Wu was cross-examined about this message. She explained that Mr Shen sent her the message when she was assembling IKEA furniture with Mr Li. She hugged Mr Shen after she received the message.
Ms Wu’s characterisation of the purchase of the Harrington Street Property was consistent with the evidence given by her mother and her children, and the evidence of others who were told about the purchase.
For completeness, as stated elsewhere, I accept Ms Wu’s account and reject Mr Morahan’s submissions concerning Ms Wu’s credibility as to the events of 29 September 2022 and the authenticity of the aforementioned WeChat message.
Rongrong Wu was taken to the Harrington Street Property around late September 2022. While at the property Mr Shen told Rongrong Wu that the apartment was his present for Ms Wu, as he wanted to take care of her in circumstances where she had taken very good care of him. Mr Shen said that Rongrong, Jackson and Selena were welcome to stay at the Harrington Street Property whenever they wanted to. Mrs Wu was cross-examined on this evidence, but not in a way that causes me to doubt the reliability of her evidence, which I accept.
Selena Tang was told by her mother in August 2022 that Mr Shen intended to buy a small apartment in the city as a gift for Ms Wu. He had also offered to have Ms Wu’s children put on the title of the property, but Selena declined that offer. In October 2022 Ms Wu took Selena (along with her brother and grandmother) to visit the Harrington Street Property which she described as the apartment which Mr Shen had bought for her. Selena had a conversation with Mr Shen in November 2022 in which he said that she was welcome to visit the apartment for New Year’s Eve. He said that he had bought the apartment for Ms Wu “as your mother has been so good to me all these years”.
Jackson Tang gave evidence that around late October 2022 he had lunch with his mother and sister in The Rocks. During the lunch Ms Wu told him that Mr Shen had bought an apartment for her. After lunch Ms Wu took her children to the apartment. In early November 2022 during a visit to Jackson’s house Mr Shen told Jackson that he was welcome to use the Harrington Street Property whenever he wanted, including to stay in it for New Year’s Eve.
Mr Shen had a conversation with Guy Wilson in September 2022. Mr Shen said that he and Ms Wu had bought a unit in the city and that Mr Wilson was welcome to come and stay there for the new year fireworks.
On 31 December 2022 Mr Shen sent a message to Ms Wu saying “Didn’t you go to our apartment No XX to watch the fireworks?” He described it as a “waste” that the Harrington Street Property was not used on the night of the New Year’s Eve fireworks. I do not regard Mr Shen’s possessive reference to the apartment as “our” apartment as inconsistent with the proposition that it was purchased for Ms Wu. Mr Shen plainly intended that he would enjoy the use of the apartment with Ms Wu, even if she was the owner of the apartment (or the majority owner through her shareholding in SJP (Australia)).

Gordon’s position is that Mr Shen intended to purchase the Harrington Street Property for him, and made a number of statements to that effect. Gordon points to other interactions and activities that are said to be more consistent with this characterisation of Mr Shen’s intentions.
The sequence of events becomes significant in assessing these contentions. From around June 2020 Mr Shen had no contact with Gordon until 9 July 2022 when he went to see Gordon at his place of work. The activities of Mr Shen and Ms Wu leading to the acquisition of the Harrington Street Property commenced in earnest in July 2022. As noted above, it is possible that this was connected to steps Mr Shen had taken earlier in April to inspect other properties in the city.
There is evidence indicating that Mr Shen did want to purchase property for Gordon and took steps in that regard. Ms Wu gave evidence that, after Mr Shen reconnected with Gordon in July 2022, Mr Shen told her that he wanted to find a small unit in the city for Gordon so that he wouldn’t need to live with his parents and it would be easier for Mr Shen to visit him. That is consistent with Gordon’s evidence, to the effect that in July 2022 Mr Shen told him that he was considering purchasing another property, which Gordon could live in or rent out.
Ms Wu says that she and Mr Shen inspected properties that might be suitable for Gordon.
Gordon attended property inspections with Mr Shen and, at least in some cases, also with Ms Wu. In July 2022 Mr Shen was considering acquiring an apartment in a project known as “Greenland Central” in Bathurst Street Sydney for $1.575 million. Towards the end of the month Gordon and Mr Shen inspected the property. Mr Shen signed an expression of interest form with a real estate agent to register his interest in buying that property. Ms Wu gave evidence that Mr Shen put a $10,000 deposit on the property. He also told her that he found the location too noisy, but observed that “young people like Gordon must like it”. Mr Shen had told Gordon before they inspected the property that he wanted Gordon to move away from his parents and live independently. There was a further inspection of the property attended by Mr Shen, Gordon and Ms Wu.
This evidence about the Greenland property is supported by evidence from Bing Wang, who was Mr Shen’s real estate agent. Her evidence, read by SJP (NSW), was that when Mr Shen paid the $10,000 deposit he told her that he was buying the property for Gordon. He asked about whether Gordon was able to acquire property, having turned 18. Ms Wang confirmed that he could, though she would need his identification. Mr Shen then appears to have changed his approach. He said, according to Ms Wang:

As at that time, Gordon was due to graduate in December 2024.
I do not regard the indications in the evidence that Mr Shen was willing to let Gordon and/or others use the Harrington Street Property, either temporarily or on an ongoing basis, to be inconsistent with the proposition that Mr Shen intended for the property to be owned by Ms Wu, or an entity owned and controlled by her. Mr Shen plainly envisaged that he would use the property with Ms Wu, and that they would allow and encourage friends and family to also use the property. There are various indications to that effect in the evidence.
It is also consistent with the broader impression emerging from the evidence that Mr Shen enjoyed sharing the benefits of his wealth with others. In the case of Gordon, I find that it is likely that Mr Shen treated the Harrington Street Property as being something that he could offer for Gordon to live in, even though the property was owned by Ms Wu’s company. To the extent that Mr Shen may have given Gordon the impression that the property was, or would be, his, that may also have reflected Mr Shen’s desire to accommodate or reassure Gordon, rather than his intention as to the beneficial ownership of the property at the time of its acquisition.
In a subsequent affidavit Gordon said that he had a meeting with his grandfather at some later time at Mr Shen’s house, when Gordon asked Mr Shen how the Harrington Street Property was going. Mr Shen replied that he had already put a deposit on and it was going into the SJP Family Trust.
Around 19 November 2022 Gordon obtained the keys to the Harrington Street Property from Ms Wu and stayed overnight there after visiting it with friends. Later that month Mr Shen told Gordon that he was welcome to visit the apartment on New Year’s Eve.
There was a delay in Gordon returning the keys. According to Gordon’s unchallenged evidence, the return of the keys was prompted by potential tenants wanting to inspect the Harrington Street Property. On 19 May 2023 Mr Shen indicated to Ms Wu that Gordon had left the keys under the doormat outside a house in Blakehurst. Mr Shen collected the keys later that day.
Mr Morahan submitted that providing the keys to Gordon was an unusual thing to do if the Harrington Street Property was intended only for Ms Wu. I do not accept that submission. As noted above, it was not part of Ms Wu’s account that the property was intended to be exclusively used and controlled by her.
On 1 February 2023 Gordon and Mr Shen had a lengthy WeChat exchange which touched on Gordon’s living arrangements and financial position. Mr Shen asked Gordon if he liked “No. ##”. I infer from the context that this was a reference to the Harrington Street Property, which is at the corresponding number of Harrington Street. Gordon replied that he liked it very much. Mr Shen went on to say:

None of the evidence detailed to this point is consistent with the proposition that the Harrington Street Property was purchased by Mr Shen with the intention that it would be owned by Gordon. Gordon did give evidence in his affidavit that before he purchased the Harrington Street Property Mr Shen told Gordon that he would buy that property with his trustee company, and would add Gordon’s name to the bank account of the trustee company “then you can manage all the assets under the trustee company”. It is true that Gordon’s name was added to the SJP (NSW) Westpac bank account, and to that extent subsequent events were consistent with Gordon’s account. Otherwise, however, there is a lack of evidence to support the suggested characterisation of the purchase of the Harrington Street Property. Gordon did not indicate the date of this conversation, beyond stating that it was before the property was purchased. He did not explain any of the broader context for the conversation occurring. The lack of detail is significant, particularly because of the concerns that arose in August and September 2022 about the potential freezing of Mr Shen’s assets and claims on his property by Ms Shen and Lei Dang. Even if a conversation along the lines recalled by Gordon did occur, I do not treat this as a reliable guide to Mr Shen’s intentions when settlement of the purchase of the Harrington Street Property occurred.
There is some evidence from other sources that at least partially supports Gordon’s claims that the Harrington Street Property was intended for him. Haoguan Wu, Mr Shen’s childhood friend, gave evidence of a conversation with Mr Shen, which occurred at some point after he had acquired the Harrington Street Property. Mr Shen described it as a place that he had purchased. When asked if he was moving there, Mr Shen said, “No. This place is for Gordon”. Under cross-examination Mr Wu could not recall when this conversation took place.
As explained above, Shanyi Su was also a childhood friend of Mr Shen. Shanyi Su gave evidence that Gordon was very precious to Mr Shen, who spoke extensively about him. Mr Su attributed their “strong emotional bond” to the fact that Mr Shen took care of him for some years after Gordon was born. Shanyi Su described a conversation with Mr Shen at some time after the Harrington Street Property had been purchased. His memory was of Mr Shen describing a unit near the Opera House. When Mr Su asked why he had purchased the property Mr Shen said that it was for his grandson Gordon for when he graduates from university. Mr Su said that Mr Shen also said “First one for Gordon. Next one for my other grandchildren. One by one”. Shanyi Su described a separate conversation with Mr Shen about his testamentary intentions, in which Mr Su asked if he was leaving everything to Gordon, to which Mr Shen responded “I think to Gordon … I will leave things to Gordon to manage, I trust him with making good decisions. He will also make sure that his mother and his siblings receive enough”.
Mr Su was tested in cross-examination about his recollection of the conversation with Mr Shen regarding the unit near the Opera House. Mr Su could not remember when the conversation occurred. His answer (given via an interpreter) was as follows:

He later clarified that Mr Shen said nothing about who would be the registered owner of the property.
I do not treat the evidence of these conversations with Mr Wu and Mr Su as carrying much weight when it comes to determining what Mr Shen intended when he (through SJP (NSW)) provided the funds to acquire the Harrington Street Property. I infer that Mr Shen was particularly motivated to give the impression that as a wealthy man he was providing support to his family, and Gordon in particular. I am satisfied that this was accurate to the extent that Mr Shen did in fact intend for the Harrington Street Property to be available to Gordon and other friends and family, regardless of the ownership arrangements. I am not satisfied that, to the extent that Mr Shen expressly or implicitly touched on the question of ownership, it was a reliable indicator of his intentions at the time of the purchase.
Ms Meiyu Shao gave evidence in cross-examination that when Mr Shen invited her to his apartment in the city he described that apartment as having been bought for “his favourite grandson”. When it comes to objectively ascertaining Mr Shen’s intentions affecting the purchase, I do not attach weight to that evidence for three main reasons. First, the timing of the statement is unclear. Second, as explained above Mr Shen appears to have had romantic designs on Ms Shao and it is unsurprising that he would not have described the apartment as having been bought with or for his partner Ms Wu. Third, Mr Shen may have been referring to his intention that Gordon would be able to use the apartment, which does not assist in clarifying the intended arrangements as to ownership.
Gordon attaches some significance to the fact that there was a childhood photograph of him on the wall of the Harrington Street Property. I do not accept that the choice of photograph assists Gordon’s case on the key question of Mr Shen’s intentions. According to Ms Wu, Mr Shen told her that he put the photograph in the apartment as he was determined to secure Gordon’s loyalty over and seeing the photo would make Gordon appreciate him and “win him over” to Mr Shen’s side. Ms Wu was not challenged on that evidence, which I accept as explaining why the photograph was put up. That explanation is consistent with a body of evidence about Mr Shen’s relationship with Gordon.
The submissions of SJP (NSW) also make much of the fact that Mr Shen’s diary entries do not make reference to the creation of SJP (Australia) or its use as the entity acquiring the Harrington Street Property. I do not regard this as a significant point. It is premised on an assumption, which I have otherwise found to be unjustified, that Mr Shen’s diary was comprehensive. Mr Shen’s diary does not make any detailed reference to the Harrington Street Property in such a way as to shed light on what Mr Shen understood to be the corporate ownership arrangements. The search for the objective manifestation of Mr Shen’s intentions must focus on other sources.

There is no way of harmonising all of the available evidence relating to Mr Shen’s statements, his intentions in providing the funds for the acquisition of the Harrington Street Property and the characterisation he gave to various people, including Gordon, of the status of that property. That is not surprising for at least two reasons. First, as observed elsewhere in these reasons Mr Shen was motivated from time to time to describe matters in a way that best suited his interests at the time. He was involved in an ongoing battle to secure Gordon’s loyalty, respect and attention. In that context I treat cautiously some of the comments made by Mr Shen to Gordon about the Harrington Street Property, including his statements to the effect that the property was “in the fund company”. Such statements may reflect Mr Shen’s belief, which was no doubt accurate while he was alive, that he expected he could effectively dictate who used the Harrington Street Property, including Gordon, even if it was owned by SJP (Australia). They may also reflect a degree of flexibility with the truth on the part of Mr Shen.
A further and related reason for caution in approaching these statements is the blurring of the lines between ownership, control and use. Mr Shen was keen to find Gordon a place to live which would allow him to move out from home and away from his parents. In some instances that was specifically connected with the prospect of purchasing a property that Gordon would own, but in other instances the arrangement was focused only on use and not ownership.
On balance, the most reliable objective and circumstantial indicators support the case of SJP (Australia), being that Mr Shen intended for the Harrington Street Property to be a gift to Ms Wu, albeit structured as an acquisition by a company controlled and largely owned by her, and with an understanding that other people (including Gordon) could use the apartment as Mr Shen wished.
More specifically, I find that when Mr Shen transferred $200,000 from his personal account to the account of SJP (NSW) on 1 September 2022 and a further $2,290,000 on 2 September 2022 he did not intend that those funds were to pass absolutely from him to SJP (NSW), which in turn would mean that the funds would become trust property to be held by SJP (NSW) on the terms of the SJP Family Trust. Mr Shen intended to retain the beneficial entitlement to those funds. He transferred them into the bank account of SJP (NSW) as a safe haven, on the basis that the funds would be returned to him at his direction or applied by SJP (NSW) at his direction (and not subject to the terms of the SJP Family Trust). SJP (NSW) therefore held those funds as a bare trustee for Mr Shen: see CGU Insurance Ltd v One.Tel Ltd (in liq*)* (2010) 242 CLR 174; [2010] HCA 26 at [36].
When SJP (NSW) then provided $1,927,939.97 from its bank account to the relevant PEXA settlement account so as to facilitate the purchase of the Harrington Street Property, it was doing so at the direction of Mr Shen by way of application of the funds still beneficially held by him.
Mr Shen’s intention in applying those funds to the purchase of the Harrington Street Property was to allow SJP (Australia) to acquire ownership of the property absolutely. That was consistent with the arrangement, which he intended to bring about, that Ms Wu would acquire effective ownership through a corporation controlled by her and largely owned by her. It follows that the presumption that the property was held by SJP (Australia) on a resulting trust in favour of Mr Shen because he provided the purchase funds is rebutted. There is ample evidence of an objectively manifested intention on the part of Mr Shen that in providing the funds to facilitate the acquisition SJP (Australia) was entitled to become the absolute owner.
If I am wrong in this analysis, in the sense that the funds should be treated as having been provided by SJP (NSW) rather than Mr Shen personally, the same conclusion would still follow. That is because if SJP (NSW) was the relevant actor it had the intention when it transferred the purchase funds that SJP (Australia) would acquire ownership of the property absolutely. The intention of Mr Shen, who acted for and controlled SJP (NSW) in relation to this transaction, is for these purposes attributable to SJP (NSW): Krakowski v Eurolynx Properties Ltd (1995) 183 CLR 563 at 582-583; [1995] HCA 68.
The following aspects of the evidence assume particular importance in reaching these findings:
Mr Shen was present when the contract was signed identifying SJP (Australia) as the purchaser. Mr Shen was a sophisticated and experienced businessman. He took responsibility for his own affairs, which involved a number of different corporate entities in China and Australia. It is implausible that Mr Shen would have been present at this transaction but paid no attention to the details of the contract. The more probable inference, which I draw, is that Mr Shen understood that the purchasing entity was SJP (Australia). It is also implausible that Mr Shen would have been ignorant of the arrangements for ownership and control of SJP (Australia);
these conclusions about the inferences to be drawn from Mr Shen’s personal involvement in the transaction are reinforced by the specific evidence of the previous transaction undertaken by Mr Shen through SJP (NSW) to acquire the unit at Treacy Street Hurstville. That transaction demonstrates that when Mr Shen wished to put real estate into the trust through SJP (NSW) he was alive to the formalities and ensured that they were attended to;
there is a significant contextual factor that explains why Mr Shen chose to transfer funds into the bank account of SJP (NSW) before applying them to the purchase of the Harrington Street Property. Mr Shen had legitimate and urgent concerns that his own assets might be subject to a claim by Ms Shen and/or a freezing order. He perceived that if the funds were in the account of SJP (NSW) that risk might be avoided;
Mr Shen transferred almost $2.5m from his personal account into the bank account of SJP (NSW). He did so immediately after becoming aware of the threats posed to his assets by Ms Shen and Lei Dang. This was a fortnight before funds were required to complete the purchase of the Harrington Street Property. The timing and the fact that the amount substantially exceeds the amount required for settlement supports the inference that Mr Shen’s purpose was not to facilitate SJP (NSW) acquiring the property as trustee for the SJP Family Trust, but rather to “park” his funds temporarily in what he perceived to be a secure account to avoid the risks that he faced from Ms Shen and Lei Dang;
Mr Shen’s legitimate concerns about Ms Shen making claims on his estate also made Mr Shen wary about putting any substantial assets into the existing SJP Family Trust. In that connection he had indicated his desire to create a new trust. That would be inconsistent with Mr Shen wishing to acquire the Harrington Street Property as an asset of SJP (NSW) as trustee for the SJP Family Trust;
Mr Shen’s WeChat message to Ms Wu, on 29 September 2022 (just nine days after settlement), corroborates her account that the apartment was a gift to her;
although Mr Shen was in parallel pursuing opportunities to acquire a property for Gordon to live in (and possibly also own), he directly involved Gordon in that process including in the inspection of such properties. By contrast, Gordon was not involved in the inspection of the Harrington Street Property and did not even see it until 10 September 2022 (after contracts had been exchanged);
Mr Shen continued to look for apartments with Gordon after the Harrington Street Property had been purchased. That behaviour and the surrounding communications with Gordon is inconsistent with the notion that the Harrington Street Property had already been acquired for Gordon (whether through the SJP Family Trust or otherwise).
All of these objective and contextual factors serve to corroborate the account given by Ms Wu in her evidence. I accept that evidence.
I reject the submissions to the contrary put by SJP (NSW). I reject the notion that Mr Shen believed both at the time of the transaction and after settlement that the Harrington Street Property was purchased by and registered in the name of SJP (NSW).

SJP (Australia) pleads in the alternative that if the Harrington Street Property was not acquired as a gift for Ms Wu (through the company controlled and largely owned by her), then the acquisition should instead be characterised as a valid distribution of capital by SJP (NSW) as trustee for SJP (Australia) as a beneficiary of the SJP Family Trust. This argument involves the following steps:
SJP (Australia) was a beneficiary under the SJP Family Trust. This is on the basis that it was a company incorporated in Australia of which a beneficiary (Mr Shen) was a beneficial owner of a voting share. That is sufficient to make SJP (Australia) a beneficiary, as of 25 August 2022, by virtue of cl 3.1(e) of the Trust Deed;
under the Trust Deed SJP (NSW) had broad discretionary powers to make income and capital distributions from the SJP Family Trust: cll 2.3(d), 4.1, 4.4, 5.1(a) and 13.1(oo) of the Trust Deed;
the transfer of funds from SJP (NSW) to SJP (Australia) constituted a valid distribution of capital by SJP (NSW). By directing the transfer of funds from its account SJP (NSW) made an irrevocable written declaration as trustee for the distribution of capital: cl 5.2(a) of the Trust Deed;
in the alternative to (3), if there was a formal defect because of the absence of an irrevocable written declaration, instrument or resolution within the meaning of cl 5.2(a) of the Trust Deed, such defect was minor and technical in nature and does not give rise to any right to trace on the part of SJP (NSW). The argument, which was not developed in submissions, appears to be that a minor and technical defect would not render the disposition unauthorised, with the consequence that no right to trace would arise: see RnD Funding Pty Ltd v Roncane Pty Ltd [2023] FCAFC 28 at [48].
In considering these contentions I proceed on the basis that the funds in question were in fact held by SJP (NSW) as trustee for the SJP Family Trust. On that particular assumption, I accept the submission that the most appropriate alternative characterisation of what occurred is that SJP (NSW) intended to confer on SJP (Australia) as a beneficiary the capital benefit of ownership of the Harrington Street Property. That is consistent with the ultimate result that Mr Shen (on this hypothesis acting through SJP (NSW)) sought to bring about. It is unnecessary, however, to determine whether that intention was implemented by a determination satisfying the formal requirements of cl 5.2(a), given the conclusions I have otherwise reached.
It follows from these conclusions that SJP (Australia) did not hold the Harrington Street Property on trust for SJP (NSW). Its sale of the property therefore did not constitute a breach of any such trust, and SJP (NSW) has no entitlement to an account of, or payment in respect of, the proceeds of sale or to interest on those proceeds. The relief sought in the Company Proceedings must therefore be refused.

In the Probate Proceedings, the Court makes the following declarations and orders:
Compliance with Pt 78 r 42(1) of the Supreme Court Rules 1970 (NSW) in respect of service of notice on Haijun Zhou is dispensed with.
Declare that the deceased, Jianping Shen, intended that his diary entry for 22 May 2023 (identified in the reasons for judgment as the 2023 Informal Will) would form his will.
The 2023 Informal Will is admitted to probate pursuant to s 8 of the Succession Act 2006 (NSW).
Declare that the plaintiff, Xiaoping (Eva) Wu, was for the purposes of the 2023 Informal Will the last person who took care of the deceased at the time of his death and on that basis is the beneficiary entitled under the 2023 Informal Will to 40% of the assets of the estate (not including shares in SJP (NSW)).
Declare that the second defendant, Gordon Dang, is the person described in the 2023 Informal Will as the “eldest nephew” and on that basis is the beneficiary entitled under the 2023 Informal Will to all of the shares in SJP (NSW) and to 60% of the assets of the estate.
The cross-claim filed by Yun Shen on 5 February 2024 is dismissed.
The formulation of the declarations in sub-pars (4) and (5) above reflects my conclusion that the 2023 Informal Will, in referring to “the family trust” being inherited by the eldest nephew, must be understood as dealing with Mr Shen’s shares in SJP (NSW) as sitting outside the assets otherwise divided on a 40%:60% basis. That is not a point that received close attention in the submissions of the parties. To the extent that the qualification in the declarations is opposed, that is a matter that will need to be raised by way of prompt application to vary the Court’s orders.
It is appropriate that letters of administration be granted for the administration of the 2023 Informal Will. Consequential orders may then also be required in relation to the grant of probate (noting that the plaintiff in the Probate Proceedings sought orders relating to the conduct of the administration, including orders dispensing with the administration bond). With a view to further orders being made to that effect, I make the following further orders:

Wu v Shen; S.JP (NSW) Pty Ltd v S.JP (Aust) Pty Ltd

At a glance

Court

Decision date

Before

Catchwords

Source

Catchwords

Judgment

Legislation Cited (10)

Cases Cited (89)

JUDGMENT

The administration of Mr Shen’s estate to date

Steps taken to notify Mr Haijun Zhou of the proceedings and his potential claim over part of Mr Shen’s estate

Issues arising for determination

Issues that were not controversial

The assets in Mr Shen’s estate

Relevant principles of Chinese law affecting the administration of the estate

The SJP Family Trust and Assets of SJP (NSW)

Capacity, credibility and other issues concerning particular witnesses and potential administrators of the estate

Ms Wu

Jackson Tang and Selena Tang

Ms Shen

The credibility of Tom Ying and Chuchu Yin

The reliability of the forensic handwriting experts

Capacity of Rongrong Wu to give evidence

The authenticity and reliability of documentary evidence

English translations of documents in Mandarin

Findings about Mr Shen’s family and personal history

Relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Shen

Relationship between Mr Shen and Gordon Dang

Ms Wu and her introduction to Mr Shen

The making of the 2021 Will

The purchase of the Harrington Street Property

The death of Mr Shen

Findings about the nature of the relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu

Evidence of Ms Wu about the nature of her relationship with Mr Shen

Documentary evidence bearing on the romantic relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu

Documentary evidence about Ms Wu’s role as a carer for Mr Shen

Evidence from third parties about Ms Wu’s role as a carer for Mr Shen

Evidence from third parties about the intimate relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu

Evidence relied on by Ms Shen and Gordon to challenge Ms Wu’s allegations about the nature of her relationship with Mr Shen

Conclusions about the nature of the relationship between Mr Shen and Ms Wu

Issue 1 in the Probate Proceedings - Did Mr Shen make the 2023 Informal Will?

The challenge to the authenticity of the Disputed Diary Entry

Findings about the circumstances relevant to entries in the diary and possession of the diary

Consistency with other contemporaneous evidence of Mr Shen’s intentions

Improbability of the contents of the disputed diary entry if made by a forger

Forensic handwriting analysis – Qualifications, evidence and experience of Ms Kiki Wong

Qualifications and experience of Ms Lam

Competing submissions about the qualifications and experience of the two experts

Forensic handwriting analysis performed by Ms Lam

Ms Lam’s conclusion that the entry for 23 May 2023 was itself suspicious and to be treated as part of the Questioned Handwriting

Other aspects of the reasoning of Ms Lam are unpersuasive

Issue 2 in the Probate Proceedings – Should the 2023 Informal Will be admitted to probate pursuant to s 8 of the Succession Act on the basis that it constitutes the last will of Mr Shen?

Issue 3 in the Probate Proceedings – How should the reference in the 2023 Informal Will to the “eldest nephew” be construed? Is it a reference to Haijun Zhou or Gordon Dang?

Issue 4 in the Probate Proceedings – Does the bequest in the 2023 Informal Will of 40% of the estate to the “last person who cared for” Mr Shen fail for uncertainty? If not, was Ms Wu the last person who cared for Mr Shen?

The proper construction of the bequest to the “last person who cared for” Mr Shen and whether it fails for uncertainty

The proper construction of the words used by Mr Shen in the 2023 Informal Will

In the alternative, if the gift is to a class of persons it remains certain and valid

A gift to Mr Shen’s last carer is sufficiently certain

Ms Wu was the last person who cared for Mr Shen

Issue 5 in the Probate Proceedings – If the Court does not admit the 2023 Informal Will to probate, should the 2021 Will be admitted to probate, in circumstances where only a copy of the 2021 Will is available?

Presumption that the original of the 2021 Will has been revoked by destruction

Issue 6 in the Probate Proceedings – If Mr Shen died intestate, was Ms Wu the de facto spouse of Mr Shen at the time of Mr Shen’s death?

Issue 7 in the Probate Proceedings – Should Ms Wu or some other person be granted letters of administration?

Issue 2 in the Company Proceedings – What was Mr Shen’s intention in relation to the purchase of the Harrington Street Property? In particular, did he intend to purchase the property for Ms Wu, for Gordon or for the SJP Family Trust?

The issue turns on the intentions of Mr Shen

Other transactions relating to SJP (NSW) and the SJP Family Trust

Findings as to the intentions of Mr Shen relating to the acquisition of the Harrington Street Property

Conduct and statements of Mr Shen during and after the acquisition of the Harrington Street Property

Indications that Mr Shen wished to provide financial support and/or buy an apartment for Gordon Dang

Findings about the intentions of Mr Shen when the Harrington Street Property was acquired by SJP (Australia)

Alternative analysis of the acquisition of the Harrington Street Property as a distribution of capital to SJP (Australia) as a beneficiary

Conclusion and orders