Tycoon must sell off multi-million estate after family feud over will

A YORKSHIRE businessman has been ordered to sell off his multi-million country estate and give half to his daughter after a family feud.

A High Court judge has told Charlie Hughes, 91, who made his fortune as a rags to riches scrap dealer, that he must hand over half of his estate in Edlington, near Doncaster to his daughter Lisa, 60.

Mr Hughes owns a luxurious property deep in the middle of Edlington Wood called Wood House.

However, six years ago, family tensions boiled over, with the family splitting into two groups which saw Lisa and her father and brother clash through the courts over the property.

Mr Hughes and his wife Nora built up the metal recycling business – but the couple’s three children took different sides, Lisa backing mother Nora, who died in 2017 at the age of 87, and John, 62, siding with dad Charlie with both claiming the property had been promised to them.

The court heard that following her death, Mrs Hughes left her half of the house and 25 acres of remaining woodland to Lisa but John challenged this and insisted it was not his mother’s to give.

He claimed his parents had bought the estate for him and wife Lorraine in 1984 with Charlie agreeing with a ‘‘horse dealer’s handshake’’ that it would be in the parents’ names but eventually ‘‘willed’’ to John – who spent £100,000 transforming it. But, after a High Court battle, Judge Andrew

Lenon ruled in Lisa’s favour and ordered that most of the family’s estate be sold off with her getting half the proceeds.

Judge Lenon said: “Whatever Charles may have told John, it is clear to me on the evidence that Nora, who ‘ruled the roost’, never agreed that John and Lorraine would become the owners of Wood House and that she always made this abundantly clear to members of her family.”

The court heard Nora and Charlie had built a fortune, having started off with a ‘‘rag trade’’ business inherited from Charlie’s father and grandfather. They had three children and married in 1982, living together until 1993, after which they remained on good terms, but living apart after Charlie had extra marital affairs.

The parents had always intended that Lisa and John would get equal shares of their fortune, with their second son David, 52, getting £1m, before Nora had a change of heart close to her death, the court heard.

She severed her joint ownership of the house and woodland with her estranged husband and changed her will, leaving her interest in it to Lisa alone.

But rejecting the father and son’s case, the judge said: “In my judgment, the reason that there are no documents evidencing the existence of the alleged 1984 agreement is that there was no such agreement.”

Nora never agreed that they would become the owners of Wood House. Judge Andrew Lenon, at the High Court.