Judge says feud ing family’s behaviour is disgusting

Grandparents, daughter-in-law at loggerheads over maintenance

A “TIT for tat” court battle between a prominent Durban couple with major business interests, mostly in Kwazulunatal, and their widowed daughterin-law, played out in court this week.

The fight is over maintenance for the grandchildren.

The couple’s son died of natural causes in 2008 and the upkeep of his wife and three minor children, including private schooling and medical aid, came from a trust fund in which the daughter-in-law is listed as a trustee.

However, the relationship between the daughter-in-law and the older couple progressively worsened since the son’s death, with the grandparents pushing for full custody of the children.

It soured to the point where the daughter-in-law resorted to make an urgent application to the Durban High Court just before Christmas to secure school fees for 2019 and other living expenses for two of her children.

Her eldest, a teenager, has been living with the grandparents since 2017.

The feuding has taken the form of court applications and counter-applications filed by both parties, including a paternity test requested by the grandparents and the daughter-inlaw’s objection to the teen travelling overseas with her in-laws.

On Friday, Judge Rashid Vahed dealt with maintenance issues, but was halted after the in-laws’ representative, advocate Ian Andre Stokes, agreed to an interim order which would cover living and schooling expenses.

Judge Vahed then moved onto the daughter-in-law’s application to have a full accounting of two trusts, which are controlled by the family.

The woman had been informed that the money in the trust to which she belonged, had almost dried up and it was unable to provide for her and the children.

But it has emerged that her children were listed as trustees of another fluid family trust. Therefore, her advocate, Elizabeth Law requested the financial documents for both trusts. Law told the court that previous document requests to the family had not been complied with.

Instead, her client was “shown partially the middle finger”.

Law said the in-laws always resisted paying maintenance even though the family’s other trust, which had the children listed as trustees, sat with more than R5 million in unpaid dividends.

Stokes insisted that they had delivered what was required and rejected insinuations that there was any skulduggery on the part of his clients in handling the trust’s affairs.

On the issue of the overseas trip, Law they said they first required an assurance that there would be responsible parenting available because the couple were elderly and the grandfather recently had struggled with breathing.

Judge Vahed responded: “The child is 16 years old. If he (grandfather) drops dead in the airplane, the teenager will be able to get back to South Africa with assistance from the flight attendants. “This is just as ridiculous as the grandparents disputing paternity of the other two children. This is disgusting, I am ashamed.”

The grandparents dropped their paternity test application in January.

Judge Vahed asked: “With all this depressing mass action and counter allegations in court, what has been done to facilitate contact between the children without any animosity?”

Stokes responded that a deal of correspondence requesting contact between the children had been sent, but their mother had continuously refused unless it was supervised.

Law responded: “Three weeks ago, there was contact between the siblings.”

The mother said the fallout with her in-laws was “a tragic saga involving elements of deception, manipulation and an abuse of wealth and power and my children were the victims of the shenanigans”.

The woman described her motherin-law as “domineering”.

In 2005, when her marriage was “on the brink of disintegration”, the mother-in-law instituted divorce proceedings on behalf of her son.

But they reconciled and decided to move overseas to make the marriage work. They returned in 2007 and lived in a house that the mother-in-law purchased. When the husband died of natural causes in 2008, the in-laws told her she had nothing to worry about.

However, in 2017, she was first informed that her monthly allowance would be cut, was threatened with eviction and the mother-in-law allowed the utility bill to run into arrears and disconnection.

The grandparents gave up their legal bid for custody of the two other children in 2018, but not before claiming she was an unfit parent.

In responding documents, the father-in-law claimed his daughterin-law’s conduct reflected her ingratitude and had they not set up the trust she and her children would have been destitute.

He said her claim for maintenance was purely to swell her own coffers and over the years she had not acted in the best interests of the children.

Judgment has been reserved.

This is just as ridiculous as the grandparents disputing paternity Rashid Vahed DURBAN HIGH COURT JUDGE