Sons’ inheritance claim goes up in smoke

A Waterkloof Ridge student's smoking habit cost him his inheritance, the High Court in Pretoria has heard. File photo: Beawiharta

A Waterkloof Ridge student's smoking habit cost him his inheritance, the High Court in Pretoria has heard. File photo: Beawiharta

Published Mar 4, 2015

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Pretoria - A Waterkloof Ridge student’s smoking habit cost him his inheritance, the High Court in Pretoria heard on Tuesday.

This came to light as one of Pretoria West businessman Dawid van Vuuren’s sons contested his will, in which he disinherited his two sons and bequeathed everything to his two daughters.

While his smoking son, Daniel, did not contest the will, Marius van Vuuren did not accept the fact that he too did not inherit anything. No reasons were forwarded in court papers as to why Marius did not.

Their sisters turned to the court for an order declaring their father’s will, written by hand on a piece of paper, his true will.

This is after the Master of the High Court declined to accept the document.

Marius felt that the Master should find that his father did not have a will and that he died intestate. He said his father told their aunt on his deathbed that he had a will and all his four children were beneficiaries.

The children only discovered the handwritten will after their father’s death last year. Daniel said in court papers that while his father always threatened to disinherit him if he did not stop smoking, he regarded this as a joke and never thought it would happen.

Contesting the authenticity of the handwritten will, Marius said he regarded the paper simply as a threat to smoker Daniel, and not the real thing.

According to him, before their father died, Daniel told him that their father drafted the “will” in which he declared his daughters the only beneficiaries of his estate in an attempt to make him stop smoking.

But Daniel said this was not true as he only became aware of the “will” after his father’s death.

“The truth is my father did admonish me on many occasions during his life that he would disinherit me if I did not stop smoking. I never took his threat seriously and I was shocked when it appeared that he actually carried out his threat.”

Daniel said he and his brother spoke about this prior to their father’s death, but they laughed about it as they thought it was funny. “I never though he would carry out this threat.”

In 2008, Dawid asked his secretary to sign the piece of paper on which he simply wrote that his daughters must inherit everything. The secretary was sworn to secrecy and told to file the paper until his death. She handed it over to the executor after his death.

Judge Cynthia Pretorius said it was clear no other testament could be found, except for this paper. Dawid’s secretary signed it as witness, as required by law. She had worked for him for 18 years and confirmed his signature was genuine.

The judge said it would have been in Daniel’s interest to support his brother that the “will” was a mere threat and not intended to be authentic. She ordered the Master to accept the paper as the true will.

Pretoria News

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