A daughter evicted, a wealthy family divided: The 10-lawsuit saga in Singapore

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SINGAPORE – A wealthy couple here were astute in using various legal methods to protect their assets, but they still failed to prevent their two children from being embroiled in about 10 legal disputes against each other and with them.

The case provides a compelling lesson that even the best-laid plans sometimes cannot prevent fights from erupting in a family when human emotions are at play, if certain members feel they have lost out on their inheritance.

What this means is that parents have to be even more decisive in getting everyone to toe the line when they are still around because most disputes happen when the heads of the family have either died or lost their mental capacity.

If parents are open and frank in ensuring that all their children are aware of the legacy plans, there will be fewer opportunities for anyone to create trouble later.

This is because when everyone is aware of the wishes of the parents, it would be harder for the troublemaker to win, even if he or she decides to try their luck by challenging the validity of the legacy plan in court.

In this case, the size of the family’s wealth was not disclosed but the family had set up a company to hold the patriarch’s properties and other assets.

High Court Judge Christopher Tan said: “The dynamics between the family members in this case were atypical, in that they often resorted to litigation to resolve their differences.”

Ironically, it was the patriarch who first sued his two children when they seemingly misused the family’s properties.

At his behest, the family company sued his son in 2003 over his use of an apartment at Ardmore Park where he was living. The company then wanted to evict the son and make him accountable for the unit’s rental income.

But the action was discontinued the following year after father and son made peace.

In 2014, it was the daughter’s turn to be sued by her father because she took out a mortgage on her property in Tanjong Rhu to finance her son’s business.

Although this property was in her name, the patriarch objected to the mortgage because he felt that she had no right to incur a loan on the apartment, which was funded by him.

So he sued his daughter and even his grandson for making use of his property without his permission. The case was settled after the daughter promised not to incur more debt on the apartment.

Fights escalated over LPA

About seven years later, the daughter applied to the Family Justice Courts to become a court-appointed representative or “deputy” to her father, who was then 93 and had supposedly lost his mental capacity.

Her application naturally caused an upheaval in the family because the patriarch had earlier made a Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) that appointed his son to manage his affairs. As a result, both the brother and their mother challenged the fresh court application.

Even before the dust settled, the daughter filed a personal protection order against her brother, alleging that he had used violence against her during an incident two months earlier. This prompted their mother to file a sworn statement to defend her son, saying that he did not hurt his sister.

In the end, this application was withdrawn, but the dispute worsened when the daughter went on to challenge the validity of her father’s LPA. She claimed that the patriarch was either coerced by her brother into signing it, or that he did not know what he was doing then.

Again, their mother intervened in this application in support of her son, and this led the Family Court to dismiss the challenge.

Unhappy with the result, the daughter appealed to the High Court but lost her case again because she failed to prove that her father’s LPA was not properly signed.

How to evict someone professionally

For the family, the daughter’s lawsuits were the straw that broke the camel’s back, and her mother, then 87, made the decision to boot her daughter out of their family home.

As the home was then an asset owned by the family company, the mother, as its most senior director, passed a board resolution to evict her daughter from the apartment.

As the owner of the property, the company stated that the daughter was barred from living there and that the occupants of the home were limited to the two elderly parents and their three helpers.

The daughter came home two days later to find herself barred from the apartment by the condominium’s security guards, who were engaged by the company to stop her from entering the unit.

The company’s lawyer was also present to explain the eviction process and show the daughter that all her belongings had been packed into boxes placed along the corridor outside the apartment.

As the daughter could not cart these boxes away at short notice, the company then arranged for the boxes to be moved to a warehouse so that she could retrieve them later.

The right to live in the family’s home?

The eviction prompted the daughter to file another lawsuit, this time against her mother and the family company for unlawfully depriving her of the right to live in that apartment.

She claimed that she had relied on an understanding that she would have an “equitable” as well as a contractual right to live there because she took care of her parents.

Her case was fraught with difficulty from the word go, as she was suing a shrewd combatant. Her mother opted not to testify in her own defence, which meant that the daughter had to prove her case based on her evidence alone.  

But she made some tactical errors during the trial, such as admitting that she did not expect anything in return from her parents. For instance, when asked whether she took care of her parents “out of love and affection” and that it was not a “commercial bargain”, she replied, “Correct”.

The daughter made another mistake by calling her mother to the stand as a witness to compel her to testify.

The judge noted that the move was an unusual one because she would end up having someone in the witness box who “unrelentingly spouted testimony” that would hurt her case.

True enough, the elderly woman said her daughter’s contribution to the household was unremarkable and that she spent most of her time “sitting in the house”.

The mother added that her daughter’s right to live in the home was not unconditional, noting that the daughter was “welcome to stay in the house so long as she stopped her incessant litigation with members of the household”.

“She was troublemaker, you know, all the time looking for the troubles,” said the mother.

After reviewing all the evidence, the court ruled that the daughter failed to prove her claim that she had a right to live in the home. It also accepted the rest of the family’s position that they had “no case to answer” and dismissed the daughter’s lawsuit.

What this means is that although it may be hard to prevent family disputes from escalating into courtroom dramas, you stand a good chance of ending them in your favour if you learn more about your legal rights as well as how the laws work.