Girish Patel, who lives in London, was seeking to claim probate over the estate of his mother, who died in 2011, on the basis of a will made in 2005 naming him as sole executor and sole beneficiary. [Girish Dahyabhai Patel and Yashwant Dahyabhai Patel, [2017] EWHC 133, Claim No HC-2015-002485]

His brother Yashwant had been named as sole executor and sole beneficiary of a will made in 1996 and claimed the subsequent will was a forgery. The family is originally from Gujarat, in India, while Yashwant is now a medical specialist in New York and the other two brothers are based in Singapore where they look after aspects of the family’s business, which includes the Aumkar palm oil plantation in Malaysia.

The court heard Yashwant's case was that Girish fabricated the will at some time in late 2014 or early 2015 and induced three former employees to say they witnessed the signing, and the fact that the will was verbally translated into Gujarati for the benefit of the brothers’ mother, who did not speak or write English.

Yashwant argued that Girish utilised a piece of blank company stationery pre-signed by the deceased, cut off the top and bottom to remove references to family companies, had the form of will drafted by him printed onto the pre-signed piece of paper so that it would ‘fit round’ his mother’s pre-existing signature in the bottom right-hand corner, and then got two employees to sign it, falsely representing that they had witnessed the signature.

Old stock

The court heard it was common ground that the thick, yellowish Conqueror paper on which the will was printed was old stock dating from the early 1990s, and was old company stationery which had had its top and bottom cut off.

The judge found this ‘very odd’, saying that even if there was a practice of using redundant stationery in the office to avoid waste, it was a strange choice to use it for such a formal, and potentially significant, document. The evidence of from employees was to the effect that the old stationery was used as scrap paper or compliments slips.

The will was very short, but the judge noted that clause 1 provided for revocation of earlier wills, even though Girish said in several witness statements that he had no knowledge of the 1986 will and assumed his mother had made no previous will.

The judge also said that given the deceased’s inability to read and write English, it was curious that Girish went to the trouble of organising the entire episode rather than simply arranging for his mother to see a local Gujarati-speaking solicitor.

Forgotten evidence

Girish gave evidence that he then totally forgot about the will until reminded by one of the employees at the end of 2014, despite his mother having died three years previously. His only explanation for what the judge called ‘striking inconsistencies’ in witness statements he gave at different points since the litigation began was that he was suffering from memory loss.

In 2016, Girish suggested for the first time that this loss of memory may have been caused by prescribed medication, namely simvastatin, which he was taking between 2007 and early 2015. However, the judge said this view was not supported by any expert medical evidence.

The High Court also heard expert evidence from forensic handwriting experts who said the deceased's signature on the will was genuine but did not date from 2005, as the ink was more faded than that used by the witnesses to the will. There was also evidence from specks of printer toner found on top of the ink of the signature which suggested the signature was on the paper before the text of the will was printed, while the impression of other signatures was detected suggesting the will was one of a number of pre-signed pieces of paper.

In his conclusion, the judge said: ‘Girish is a chartered accountant and sits as an arbitrator. I would, in the normal course of events, expect such a witness to be reliable and trustworthy.

‘However, Girish is a self-confessed liar and, as I have mentioned, even when accepting that he had lied to the court, there was a certain insouciance in his responses which increased, rather than allayed, my concerns as to his reliability generally.

‘Regrettably, I have reached the conclusion that, despite his professional and business achievements, the truth is a flexible concept for Girish, to be fashioned according to his own interests and requirements.’

Girish Dahyabhai Patel and Yashwant Dahyabhai Patel, [2017] EWHC 133 is here.