Son of car boot king in £5m will battle with stepmother
(who’s 2 years younger than him)
THE son of a multi-millionaire ‘car boot king’ left without a penny in his father’s will is battling his stepmother over the family fortune.
Richard Scott, who died aged 81 last year, was worth £5million thanks to his vast Cheshire farm on which ITV’s Car Boot Challenge was filmed.
His eldest son Adam, 56, claims he worked on the farm from the age of nine and was promised it would be his one day.
But after Mr Scott senior married second wife Jennifer – who is two years younger than Adam – he wrote his son out of his will and left her in control of his millions.
Now Adam Scott has gone to court claiming his father was not in his right mind when he signed his two final wills.
Lawyers for Mrs Scott claim her husband knew exactly what he was doing and that her stepson’s relationship with his father ‘completely broke down’ after he tried to have him sectioned.
Judge Nicholas Caddick QC was told by Adam’s lawyers at the High Court in London on Wednesday that the family had been farming in Cheshire for around 300 years and ‘traditionally passed the farmland and business down the generations’.
They said he had spent more than 40 years helping to run the farm and managing the car boot sales – which featured in the Bargain Hunt-style game show.
Richard’s first wife, Adam’s mother Janet, died in 1976, and he began a relationship with Jennifer 18 years later, marrying her in 2016 – two years before his death by cancer.
Months after his wedding, Richard signed two wills which disinherited Adam and left Jennifer as executor of his will and a major beneficiary. Her two sons and Adam’s sister were also made beneficiaries.
Adam claims his father ‘lacked capacity’ to write those final wills because he had an increasingly severe degenerative brain disorder which caused him to ‘ act strangely’. He is also bringing an alternative claim for the farm, saying he relied on his father’s promises he would inherit it and had sacrificed his chance to make a life for himself elsewhere.
His barrister William East said: ‘Adam began working on the farm aged nine, when he learned how to use the potato harvester. Throughout his childhood, Richard encouraged Adam to involve himself as fully as possible on the farm.’
Mr East claimed Adam worked for little or no pay, often 100 to 130 hours a week without holidays. He gave up a more lucrative career as a kitchen designer at his father’s request, he claimed. Mr East concluded: ‘He continued to work with his father under these conditions because of his understanding that the business and the farm would one day be his own.’ But Rory Brown, for Mrs Scott, told the judge Richard had fallen out with his son on reasonable grounds after he tried to have him ‘committed’.
The warring family were in court for a preliminary hearing. Adam was granted an interim injunction barring his stepmother and her sons from ‘trespassing’ on parts of the farm over which he holds tenancies.
Last year Mrs Scott was charged under dangerous dog laws after her pet savaged a policeman called to the farm near Knutsford by her estranged stepson.
At the hearing her lawyer said: ‘It is my thinking he wants some part of the inheritance. He lives across the road from the family and is constantly calling the police trying to report them.’
She was ordered to pay damages to the officer – who suffered puncture wounds to his leg – and was given a full community order and curfew.
‘Sacrificed chance of another life’