Two sisters who allegedly referred to their father as “the chequebook” have lost a second legal fight with their stepmother over his fortune, which they claimed was worth some ￡7m.
Tony Shearer, the former chief executive of merchant bank Singer and Friedlander, died with a brain tumour in 2017 at the age of 68, leaving nearly all of his wealth to his wife, Pamela.
His two daughters – Juliet Miles, 40, and Lauretta Shearer, 38 – were left nothing in his will.
An attempt by the pair to demand “maintenance”, based on the grounds that their father had made “generous financial provision” for them while alive, was thrown out at the High Court in April after Ms Shearer – a 68-year-old marketing executive who married the banker in 2007 – argued that her husband had cut his stepdaughters out of his will after being upset by their “demands for money”.
While giving evidence, Ms Shearer told the judge, Sir Julian Flaux: “I'm going to quote King Lear here: ‘sharper than a serpent’s tooth’ is an ungrateful child – and that is how my husband felt.”
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Despite Sir Julian criticising the daughters’ evidence as having been “imbued with and influenced by a sense of entitlement” in his ruling, the pair returned to court again last week week in a bid to appeal, with their lawyers claiming the judge had been wrong not to conclude Ms Shearer had “lied to the court”.
The pair’s claim was based in part on a suspicion that, after their father died, Ms Shearer had altered her mirror will against his wishes in order to stop them from receiving any of the estate after her own death.
In the request to appeal, their lawyers argued last week week that the judge should have drawn an “adverse inference” in relation to Ms Shearer’s honesty, after she refused to specify in evidence the “private” details of her will, instead telling the judge she had “not revoked” any provision her husband may have made for his extended family.
But throwing out the daughters’ challenge, Sir Julian said: “Pamela gave evidence that she had not altered her will and that she would respect Tony’s wishes. That’s what she said.”
The daughters’ lawyers “put to her several times that she had altered her will and she denied it”, he said, adding: “Further cross-examination would have gone round in circles and I was not prepared to conclude that she was lying to the court.”
“The claimants’ case failed due to deficiencies in their own evidence, not because I wrongly assessed the evidence of the defendant,” Sir Julian said, adding that he was also entitled to conclude that their mother would continue to provide financial support for the pair, with their father having “made it clear they should have no expectation of inheritance”.
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Ms Miles, who lives with her mother at a ￡1.6m home in Enford, Wiltshire, had tried to claim ￡915,991. Ms Shearer, who works at Sotheby’s auction house, had sought ￡350,154.
The estate was valued at around ￡2.2m, but the privately educated daughters argued that other assets passed to Ms Shearer such as heirlooms and expensive wines brought the value of their father’s fortune to around ￡7m.
During the trial of the case earlier this year, the daughters claimed their father “changed” when he married Ms Shearer, with a rift forming so deep that he refused to walk Lauretta down the aisle at her wedding after he was told his new wife was not invited.
In the witness box, Ms Shearer told the judge that it was the daughters’ “repeated requests for money” that had been upsetting their father before he made his will leaving everything to her.
“Parents deserve a bit of respect. Those two girls enjoyed a luxury lifestyle,” she said.
On this point, the judge said in his first ruling: “Pamela’s evidence was that Tony had said he did not always enjoy seeing the claimants because he knew the encounter would end with a request for money, which he found distasteful. I am satisfied that he did say that and that there was an element of truth to it.
“He had told her they were wayward and out of control [as teenagers]. He also told her that [when younger] both claimants referred to him as ‘the chequebook’, which they found amusing but he found hurtful.”
Sir Julian concluded that their father “did not have any obligations or responsibilities towards either of the claimants at the time of his death”.
“Whilst the claimants may well have enjoyed an affluent lifestyle until they were in their early twenties, when their parents divorced they were not entitled to expect that standard of living indefinitely, nor did they in fact do so, given that, as I have held, the lifestyle choices they both made in terms of marriage and family were not dependent upon their father’s financial support,” the judge said.
“Tony had made generous provision for both claimants with the gift of [￡177,000 for Juliet and ￡185,000 for Lauretta] in 2008 which they were able to invest in property.
“He made it clear at that time that they could not expect any further financial assistance from him.”
Additional reporting by Champion News Service