Via The Daily Mail !
Three members of a family have run up a £1million legal bill fighting a court battle over the ownership of a cottage worth £245,000.
A senior judge said it was a ‘tragedy’ the argument was not amicably settled.
He added the ensuing four-year legal battle that ‘fractured’ the farming family was ‘one of the most regrettable pieces of litigation that I have ever come across’.
It began when mother-of-two Pamela Teasdale, 68, demanded a divorce from her husband Daniel, 73, after 44 years of marriage.
She wanted to continue living at Burne Farm, Todwick, South Yorkshire, and start a livery business there. But Mr Teasdale, whose family had run the farm for three generations, wanted her to leave with a lump sum payoff.
What should have been a minor complication in sorting out their affairs was dealing with the ownership of Cow House. The renovated farm building was home to their daughter Rebecca, 45, her husband Andrew Carter, 45, and their daughter.
Both parents, who have another daughter Penelope, were happy for Mrs Carter and her family to stay at the cottage, which had been transformed from a dilapidated barn at a cost of £200,000.
As the judge was to comment later, the fact that Mr Teasdale had £2.3million in the bank from the sale of some of land to developers meant finding an agreement between them should have been ‘relatively straightforward’.
Instead a row over the ownership terms of the cottage blew up into a bitter family dispute in which Mrs Teasdale even accused Mrs Carter of planting a listening device in her lounge to snoop on her.
A nine-day High Court hearing followed by a two-day appeal hearing, with all three family members represented by expensive legal teams, led to a total legal bill of £1,048,000.
Mrs Teasdale ended up losing the court battle, with her daughter awarded ownership of Cow House once the remaining £85,000 mortgage was paid off.
Mrs Carter said she had been paying the mortgage for years but her mother said it was rent.
Judge Gordon Shelton, backed by the appeal judge Mr Justice Moor, ruled the parents had both promised the cottage to their daughter and rejected Mrs Teasdale’s denial this was the case.
However, the judge refused Mrs Carter’s bid to stop any future livery business being run nearby by her mother because it would disturb their peace.
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