Children win battle over £7m will
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The three children of a lawyer who left his entire £7 million fortune to his second wife today won their legal battle to have their father's will declared invalid.
Sisters Daliah and Donna Sherrington and their brother Ramon put forward a case last month before Mr Justice Lightman in the High Court that their father's second wife Yvonne had pressured him into making a will and he was not fully aware of the contents.
Mr Justice Lightman, revoking the will in a judgment today, said Mr Sherrington had told friends that his second marriage had been "the biggest mistake of my life" and Yvonne was only interested in him for his money.
He said he had heard evidence that Mr Sherrington had become depressed and withdrawn because of the strains of their "volatile and tempestuous" relationship.
Yvonne Sherrington claimed in the witness box she had a letter in her file contradicting this.
"Though I requested her to do so, she never produced this further letter and quite plainly it never existed," said the judge.
Daliah, 30, Donna, 27 and Ramon, 21, claimed that signatures on the will were not properly witnessed and that their father, who died aged 56 in an accident on the M25 in October 2001, had been pressured by his second wife into making the will.
The court was told that the will was drawn up by Yvonne's daughter from a previous marriage, Nathalie Walker, who had no legal qualifications.
Mrs Sherrington claimed that her husband's children were not close to their father because they blamed him for the break–up of his first marriage to their mother Gloria.
She said Mr Sherrington, who ran a firm of solicitors in north London and a mortgage loan company, had made ample provision for the children and his first wife with life insurance policies and had asked for wills to be drawn up which mutually left their possessions to each other.