Tycoon forced to give National Trust £5.5m

Millionaire who fell out with charity cannot change his will to alter bequest because he has dementia

A BUSINESSMAN who fell out with the National Trust will see his millions inherited by the charity because his dementia means he cannot change his will, a court has ruled.

Michael Collins, a millionaire property tycoon, made a will in 1990 leaving almost every penny of his fortune to the trust before he and his wife clashed with the charity over building plans.

However, a High Court ruling last week means that attempts to change Mr Collins’s original will fail, and the trust stands to receive £5.5million.

The trust will inherit proceeds from the sale of the couple’s former home in Kensington, west London, which sold for £4.5 million last April as well as their Cotswold cottage, which fetched just under £1million in 2015.

Christine Collins died aged 65 in 2014 just weeks after being diagnosed with cancer and her husband, 78, is now in a nursing home with dementia.

Mrs Collins would have wanted most of her wealth to be donated to Opera Holland Park in west London where she was a patron as opposed to the trust, family and friends said.

Last year, the venue, which previously named its young artists scheme after her, awarded her a posthumous philanthropy award.

The couple fell out with the trust in 2005 over plans to build a large bird hide and boardwalk on the boundary between their garden and a country estate owned by the charity. They felt trust staff had been rude, patronising and dismissive of their concerns over the plans meant for the Sherborne country estate in Gloucestershire, which is used to film BBC’S Autumnwatch.

Because the couple never had children, when Mrs Collins died her half of the couple’s property assets transferred to her husband’s estate and are subject to his will. Last week at the High Court, Judge Jeremy Cousins QC said the couple had developed a “deep-rooted antipathy” of the charity. He also noted that in 2007, Mrs Collins had lodged an application for a statutory will, on behalf of someone who lacks mental capacity, but “not surprisingly it met with some resistance on the part of the National Trust”.

In her own will, she had left £1million in legacies and the remainder of her estate to the Glyndebourne Opera House and the National Theatre.

Mary Padfield, her close friend and executor, told the Daily Mail: “I’m just glad she is not alive now to see what has been going on.” Eileen Pattison, the wife of Mrs Collins’s brother, Ian, told the paper: “I have no doubt she would have wanted the money to go to the opera house. It is hard to believe the trust now seems likely to get the lot.”

Alan and Penny Morris, fellow objectors to the bird hide and boardwalk, said Mrs Collins would have been “incandescent” about the ruling.

A National Trust spokesman said: “We are not driving any action to obtain funds in this case. Had Mr Collins ever decided to alter his will to remove the National Trust, we would have respected that decision.”