Former ambassador’s £20m inheritance battle with ‘surrogate daughter’
THE wife of a retired ambassador has denied claims he “abdicated” his £15million mansion to his “surrogate daughter” and moved away to die.
David Gladstone, former High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, is suing lawyer Leigh White, a longtime family friend who he says is squatting in his Grade-I listed stately home.
But Mrs White, who says the frail ex-diplomat once treated her as his child, insists she is the rightful heir to his mansion and £20million estate, insisting he made binding promises that Wotton House, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire would be hers.
Vision
Mr Gladstone’s wife Mary, 84, told the High Court it would be “intolerable” for them to move back into Wotton unless Mrs White leaves, adding: “We are too old and tired to deal with the drama.”
She also said Mr Gladstone, 87, had become “less relaxed” in his home once Mrs White started living there with him in 2017 after his son’s death. And she denied claims that, when the couple moved to her home in the first lockdown, she told Mrs White she was “taking David to Cumbria to die” and he had “abdicated from Wotton”.
However, Mrs White insisted she was picked out by Mr Gladstone as his heiress because he could trust her to press on with his vision of making it a centre for classical music.
She told the judge it was wrong to say David was “vulnerable and didn’t know what he was doing” or that she had taken a tight control of his affairs. Mrs White claims that, from 2007 when the first alleged assurances were made, she had “positioned her whole life” depending on an inheritance, harming her own legal career.
Mr Gladstone is also suing for the return of around £800,000 in bonds transferred to Mrs White.
But she denies unduly influencing him into transferring them, saying the decision was inheritance tax planning by a man well into his 80s.
Mr Justice Trower will deliver a judgment at a later date.