Smoking is bad for you

A WATERKLOOF Ridge student’s smoking habit cost him his inheritance, the high court in Pretoria has heard.

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, the other, Marius, did not accept that he too did not inherit. Their sisters turned to the court for an order declaring their father’s will, written on a piece of paper, his true will. This is after the Master of the High Court had declined to accept the document.

Marius felt the Master should find that his father did not have a will and that he died intestate.

He said his father told his sister (the father’s sister) on his deathbed that he had a will and all four of his children were beneficiaries.

The children discovered the handwritten will after their father died last year. Daniel said that although his father threatened to disinherit him if he did not stop smoking, he thought it was a joke.

Marius, in contesting the authenticity of the handwritten will, said he regarded the paper simply as a threat to Daniel.

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

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

“The truth is my father did admonish me on many occasions that he would disinherit me if I did not stop smoking. I never took his threat seriously,” he said.

In 2008, Dawid had asked his secretary to sign the piece of paper on which he simply wrote that his daughters must inherit everything.

She was sworn to secrecy and told to file the paper until his death. She handed it over to the executor of the will after Dawid’s death.

Judge Cynthia Pretorius said it was clear that no other testament could be found except for this paper.

She ordered the Master to accept the paper as being the true will.