Beaverbrook decision appeal focuses on Cory
Last Updated: Monday, April 23, 2007 | 2:14 PM ET
CBC News
The Beaverbrook Foundation is challenging the impartiality of former Supreme Court justice Peter Cory in its high-profile dispute with an art gallery in Fredericton.
In its appeal of Cory's March 26 ruling on ownership of paintings at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, foundation lawyers took issue with a comment made by Cory during the arbitration hearings.
At one session, the foundation called the original Lord Beaverbrook, who founded the gallery in Fredericton, a "master propagandist" because he described the paintings as gifts in newspaper stories, even if he was only lending them to the gallery. Cory responded that, in that case, maybe Joseph Goebbels should not have been put on trial for war crimes.
By "comparing Lord Beaverbrook to Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister in Hitler's Third Reich," Cory did not appear to be "even-handed" when he awarded 85 of the most valuable paintings to the gallery, foundation lawyers argue in their 12-page statement, filed on Thursday.
The appeal document also repeats many of the arguments the foundation's lawyers made during the marathon arbitration hearing last fall. For example, it says, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery acknowledged for 40 years that the paintings were on loan before declaring three years ago that they were gifts from Lord Beaverbrook.
The appeal argues that Cory failed to take into account those facts when he awarded most of the paintings to the gallery.
The appeal under New Brunswick's Arbitration Act will be heard by a panel of three retired appeal judges: one chosen by the foundation, one chosen by the gallery and the third chosen by the two appointed judges.
The judges have not been named yet and no date has been set for when the case will be heard.
Lord Beaverbrook, born William Maxwell Aitken, was the New Brunswick-raised British press baron and politician who established the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in 1958 and mounted on its walls much of his own art collection. He died in 1962.
The Beaverbrook United Kingdom Foundation, a philanthropic group founded by Lord Beaverbrook and run by his grandson, Maxwell Aitken III, has maintained for the past three years that the 133 works of art in contention, estimated to be worth $100 million, were only loaned to the gallery.
