A farmer’s wife “took advantage” of her husband’s Alzheimer’s in a bid to do their son out of his promised £10 million inheritance, a judge has ruled.
Pamela Moore even accused her son, Stephen, of violent harassment in her fight to stop him taking over the family farm from his father, Roger.
But Judge Simon Monty QC said Stephen had worked since childhood on the 650-acre farm in Stapleford, near Salisbury, which has been in the Moore family for generations.
The High Court heard the father of two took no expensive holidays, lived a frugal lifestyle with his family in a bungalow on the estate and earned less than £300-a-week.
And the judge accepted that, before Alzheimer’s disease robbed him of his sharp mind, Stephen’s father had repeatedly promised him “it will be all yours one day”.
Handing 48-year-old Stephen the entire farm, including its substantial farm house, the judge said he was entitled to rely on the assurances given to him by his father.
Roger Moore had had difficulty coping with what he saw as his “demotion as head of the family farming business” after Alzheimer’s began to take hold in 2008, the court heard.
Mrs Moore was adamant that it would be unfair on their daughter, Julie, if Stephen inherited the whole farm, which was described as being “by far the family’s biggest asset”.
But Judge Monty said: “It was always Roger’s intention that Stephen would inherit the farm and the business, and that intention was shared by Pamela.
“These intentions were expressed as promises to Stephen. Particularly after 2009, Pamela took advantage of Roger’s mental decline, which in my view does her no credit.
“She was and remains determined to redress what she regarded as a stark inequality of likely inheritance between Stephen and Julie.”
Mrs Moore, the judge added, had “unfairly portrayed Stephen as a violent and difficult son who made her and Roger’s life a misery.”
She simply “refused to accept” that Roger’s “unchanging intention”, while he had all his mental faculties, was “to see Stephen at the helm”.
By 2009, Roger was suffering from serious memory loss and his increasing sense of uselessness led him to say “I might as well shoot myself”, the court heard.
But, as Stephen grew up, his father had encouraged him to work on the farm and passed on to his son his “passion for farming”.
Spending three years at agricultural college, Stephen had “thrown himself wholeheartedly into working on the farm”.
“Since he was a teenager it was not only clear to him that he would one day take over the running of the farm, but also that Roger… encouraged him in that belief”, said the judge.
“Roger would say to him that all of this, referring to the farm, would be his one day. It seems to me that everything points to an over-arching plan under which Stephen would inherit the whole farm and business in due course and that Stephen was told this was the case.”
Photo Credit: NIKLAS HALLE’N/AFP