Family cash stoush ends up in High Court
A granddaughter claimed $600k given to her to buy a house and truck was her early inheritance — a judge has ruled otherwise.
A family feud over cash loans used to buy a house and a truck has ended up at the High Court, and landed a woman with an order to pay her grandparents more than half-a-million dollars.
Katrina Jean Brooky claimed the almost $600k given to her to buy a house and truck was her early inheritance; however, a High Court judge has ruled otherwise.
Details of the family cash stoush are laid bare in a 35-page ruling from Justice Paul Davison. It reveals how the saga began in August 2014 when Brooky contacted her grandmother Betty Merle Erni to tell her she intended to make an offer on a Te Kuiti property.
‘‘In discussions that followed, the defendant told Betty she did not have the money to pay the deposit, and asked her to pay it for her,’’ the ruling said.
She also lacked the funds to pay for the balance of the property.
This set in train a payment from her grandparents’ of $309,536 to cover the deposit, legal fees and to settle on the house, with an agreement she would repay them $250 per week.
Brooky was the couple’s eldest grandchild.
More cash changed hands in 2016 when Brooky asked them to purchase a truck for her fencing materials small business at a cost of $300,000, prompting her grandparents to advance $20,000 for a deposit and later, $250,000 for the full purchase.
‘‘Betty says that it was also agreed the defendant would make interest-only payments rounded up to $1200 per month.’’
By 2017, Betty and her husband Peter Michael Erni had decided to sell their Coromandel property to move to Hamilton ‘‘where they would be closer to the defendant’’.
It was also suggested Brooky sell the Te Kuiti property, using the cash to acquire a one-third share of a lifestyle property where all three of them would reside.
At this new property however, ‘‘the parties’ relationship progressively deteriorated’’.
Brooky had sold the Te Kuiti property for $442,000 but put off paying the agreed $385,000 towards the joint property ‘‘and repeatedly told the plaintiffs that she would ‘do it tomorrow’ ’’.
By late November 2017, ‘‘the disagreement between the parties had come to a head’’ and Brooky moved out of the shared property.
‘‘She considered the plaintiffs were not treating her as an independent adult, were unnecessarily critical of her, were exploiting her and treating her like their ‘slave’ ’’, the ruling said.
Relations worsened when on January 31, 2018, Brooky served a trespass notice on her grandparents to prevent them entering her new property.
‘‘Received your trespass notice (how sad). Yes we will abide by it,’’ Betty and Peter wrote in a letter to Brooky.
However, they asked Brooky to pay off the $280,000 debt she owed for the truck and trailer, plus $30,000 borrowed back in March and April.
‘‘The $308,000 loan for the Te Kuiti property can sit there with you (as you were) paying $250 per week.’’
In a written reply, Brooky told her grandparents that she believed the $308,000 was an early inheritance, and that the $250 a week payments ‘‘was to build my inheritance account back up to when you did pass I had something to fall back on’’.
‘‘This was not a loan as you have tried to say.’’
Betty then wrote back to say Brooky’ owed them almost $600,000, which amounted to ‘‘Grandparent financial abuse’’.
On May 2 last year, the couple launched legal action to claim those funds back.
The ruling also spelt out Brooky’s position. ‘‘Her grandparents gifted her the money for the house and related costs as an early payment of her inheritance, and with the consequence that she would not receive anything from their estates upon their death,’’ it said.
‘‘The defendant says that there is no documentation to prove that the house loan was anything other than a gift, and that the plaintiffs are ‘simply trying to rewrite history for their own benefit’ ’’.
Brooky’s lawyer also claimed ‘‘there is no evidence that the parties intended to enter into contracts, and no evidence of any loan documentation’’.
Justice Davison, however, found much of Brooky’s evidence ‘‘implausible and lacking in credibility’’.
‘‘The defendant’s claim to be paying $250 per week to her grandparents so as to accumulate a ‘nest egg’ for herself is also implausible,’’ he said.
‘‘If the payments were to be for the defendant’s own benefit, then she could have made them into a bank account in her own name.
‘‘I find that the defendant has failed to discharge the onus to prove the sums advanced to her for the purchase of the Te Kuiti house and truck were provided to her as gifts simpliciter.’’
Davison made orders against Brooky for the sum of $268,247 in respect of the house loan and $305, 762.37 in respect of the truck, a total of $574,009.37.
— Stuff reporter