David James will not mark 2016 up as a good year

He has been pursued by banks after the collapse of 12 companies in his wine and publishing empire.

In March the NSW Police Force’s Fraud and Cybercrime Squad launched Strike Force Farrington to find $5 million in missing prestige wines he once held in trust for up to 300 owners.

And on Thursday the former James Estate director marked up another loss, after a NSW court rejected his appeal against a judge’s ruling that he had staged “several coups d’etat” to become trustee of his father-in-law’s substantial estate.

Mr James was ordered to pay costs after the NSW Court of Appeal agreed with an earlier ruling that there was “not one shred of evidence to justify Mr James in interfering in the way that he did” with his father-in-law’s estate.

Between June 2013 and January 2014 Mr James appointed himself a trustee after removing his mother-in-law, Zeta Douglas, and sister-in-law as trustees from Stan Douglas’s estate of more than $2.4 million.

Mr Douglas died of mesothelioma in December 2011 after more than 40 years at Newcastle Steelworks where he rose to the position of electrical department superintendent, and was known as a champion of other workers diagnosed with asbestosis and mesothelioma.

Mr James then caused “chaos” in 2015 by repeating an attempt to remove his sister-in-law as trustee and appointing himself by an “unreasonable misreading” of a NSW Supreme Court decision that he had no power to do so, a judge found.

Justice Robert McDougall found Mr James was “a person who was willing to say anything that might suit him if he thinks it will advance the case he is seeking to put”.

On Thursday the Court of Appeal confirmed the earlier ruling and found he had no power to remove or appoint trustees, and his appeal proceeded in “essentially an adversarial fashion without any good reason for doing so”.

In 2012 Mr James lost a Supreme Court case after the Australian Tax Office pursued him for almost $4.3 million in tax, interest and penalties.