Malcolm Kyle

By LUKE SALKELD – Daily Mail online
3rd November 2010

The ex-wife and the girlfriend of a millionaire estate agent both forged a will in a dispute over his fortune, a court heard yesterday.

Chris John died suddenly at the age of 47, leaving a property portfolio and sports cars – but no will.

His girlfriend Gillian Clemo used a forged will to try to ensure she could stay in the luxury home the couple had shared, the jury was told.

His former wife Helen John, 48, who had split from her husband ‘acrimoniously’ after his affair with Clemo, then altered that will after discovering that their divorce had never been officially finalised, it was said.

The alleged fraud and counter fraud began after Mr John, who once sold a property to singer Charlotte Church, died of a brain haemorrhage. There was no sign of a will deciding how his estate should be divided.

Clemo, 57, is said to have wanted Mr John’s sisters to be appointed as executors, so she would be allowed to continue living in the Cardiff house.

John Philpotts, prosecuting, told Newport Crown Court: ‘When no will was discovered there developed a dispute as to who should administrate the estate. On the one hand were the two sisters and on the other hand Helen John. No agreement could be reached.’

‘Mrs Clemo wanted the sisters to be executors so she would be allowed to stay in the house.’

The court heard Clemo then swore an affidavit that the will, which left the estate to Mr John’s daughter when she reached 27, was real and that she had witnessed it.

But Mr Philpotts said handwriting experts decided it was not Mr John who had signed the will. ‘In addition there was the fact that Mr John’s daughter’s name was spelled wrongly,’ he said.

Talking about the will, Mrs John told the court: ‘I was shown a copy. It was on A4 white paper with a couple of lines written on it. It immediately struck me that it didn’t look like my husband’s signature.’

Mrs John admitted forging a modification to the will, although details were not given in court. She said she had been worried about her daughter’s inheritance, said to be worth millions.

The jury heard she had been given a formal caution by police instead of being taken to court.

Clemo denies using a forged will under the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act.

The trial continues.

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By NICK MCDERMOTT – Daily Mail
Last updated at 6:58 AM on 15th October 2010

An army major faced his late father’s mistress in court yesterday as they both accused each other of hiding his £500,000 will.

Rowena Ferneley boasted that Charles Napier, who had terminal cancer, told her she was his ‘miracle cure’ in the bedroom, and had promised to leave her ‘virtually everything’.

But Mr Napier’s two children  -  Major Stephen Napier and Catherine Brooks  -  dispute her claims saying their relationship was not ‘sincere’.

They say she got rid of his will so she could claim their inheritance.

However, in dramatic scenes yesterday, Major Napier’s estranged wife, Fiona, backed the mistress.

She told the High Court her husband had found a copy of the will shortly after his death from prostate cancer in which the two children were described as ‘estranged’.

Married Mrs Ferneley, 49, says the document was ‘suppressed’ by the two children to leave her with nothing, despite she and Mr Napier, who died at 65, being the ‘love of each other’s lives.

Asked if she had ever seen a will made by Mr Napier, she said she had not, but added: ‘Charles told me before going into hospital for a hip replacement operation that if he went he would leave everything to me.’

The court heard how the pair planned to set up an organisation to help bereaved children on the Isle of Wight, where Mr Napier had bought a £350,000 cottage. He had a further £150,000 in assets.

Mrs Ferneley said her lover, who died in November 2008, had promised to help her continue the project and provide for her so she could leave her husband.

She added: ‘Charles told me he had cut his children out of his life a long time ago.’ In a further twist, a former girlfriend of Mr Napier’s claimed it would have been impossible for him to have sex with Mrs Ferneley as his condition had left him impotent.

The court heard Mr Napier’s children had hardly seen their father since he divorced their mother Barbara more than 20 years ago.

Mrs Ferneley met him in 2005, but it was another nine months before they became lovers. She claims he later told her he knew from first setting eyes on her ‘that’s the woman I am going to marry’.

According to wills and probate law if the High Court judge rules Mr Napier of Sunbury-on-Thames, Surrey died without leaving a will (known as intestate), his estate will go to his estranged children.

The hearing continues.

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Please be careful. Not all Will writing companies have published, fixed-prices for their services.

This is a report dated 9th August 2010 by Vivian White – BBC Panorama, which is being screened later tonight.

The private will-writing industry across Britain should be more tightly regulated as consumers are losing thousands of pounds to charlatans, a Scottish minister has told Panorama.

Consumers have complained of cheap will offers with escalating hidden costs. Beneficiaries have also had payouts stolen.

The Scottish Government is legislating to offer greater protection, but Fergus Ewing MSP, its minister for community and safety protection said the rest of the UK also needed to be protected.

The Legal Services Board (LSB), which oversees all legal services in England and Wales, has said it would look at “whether a different regulatory approach to will writing is needed”.

Mr Ewing said the rest of Britain should follow Scotland’s example. “The public have a right to be protected,” he said, “in Scotland they will be.

“Anyone who is charging a fee for writing a will must be regulated. They must have appropriate qualification, they must have proper indemnity in place. At present none of this protection exists.

“I hope that justice will be done for people – throughout Britain, ideally – in protection against crooks, cowboys and conmen.”

The Panorama investigation uncovered cases where initial will-writing fees of £75-£100 escalated to thousands of pounds, with clients and families of the deceased then being charged fee percentages for handling estates after death, which they were never told about.

One firm lost a will lost even though a fee was being charged for it to be safely stored. Other beneficiaries struggled to receive the money owed to them, and cheques from the firm they were dealing with bounced.

‘Perfect crime’

Wills of Distinction, a firm based in Lincoln, stole hundreds of thousands of pounds from its beneficiaries.

These included a hospice for the dying, St John’s in north London, which had been left £130,000 by a man with terminal cancer, Paul Jefferson. It relies on charitable donations, but never received a penny.

Mary Neenan, a single mother from Birmingham, was also unexpectedly left a large sum when her friend Herbert Reeves died, but never received anything.

She said: “I brought my two daughters up on my own, and I would never have had that amount of money in my life. To have something like that £35,000-£40,000, would have been a life-changing amount of money for the three of us.”

Ms Neenan went to the police, who uncovered the extent of the firm’s fraud.

Two men, David Nash, the firm’s founder, and Nicholas Butcher, a previously struck-off solicitor whom he employed, were sentenced in July 2010 to three and a half years in prison for their fraud and theft.

Neil Hollingsworth of the Economic Crimes Unit of Lincolnshire Police said:

“It’s a despicable crime… I believe they thought they would get away with it.

“A lot of the times, probably 90% of those cases, the beneficiaries didn’t know they were beneficiaries and so they weren’t asking questions. I guess they probably thought they’d got the perfect crime.”

New competitors
Private will-writing companies now claim to write about 10% of all new wills, and the industry has grown with the increase in home and shared ownership.

More people now have something to leave behind and they are new competitors to old-established providers.

In the past, people either wrote their own wills, or traditionally, if they wanted professional help they had to go to a solicitor. But solicitors are governed by law; will-writing firms are not.

Richard Elmer, a solicitor at Burton and Co in Lincoln said: “We will strive mightily to get everything exactly as it should be.

“But like all solicitors, we are fully insured, we are fully regulated and there is ultimately the solicitors’ compensation fund were there to be, God forbid, some mistake made by us.”

This is the key difference which solicitors always point to, that on top of their professional training they have a profession-wide indemnity scheme, and profession-wide protection for clients.

There are self-styled professional bodies that represent private will-writers and amongst these there are examples of good practice and attempts at effective self-regulation.

However, there is no regulation by law and consumers are typically unaware of this fact and often appear to believe that will-writing companies are themselves legal firms.

Scotland’s new regulations will come in to effect next year.

The Legal Services Board said it would soon be calling for evidence to assess whether regulation is necessary.

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