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The England and Wales Court of Appeal (EWCA) has rejected a proprietary estoppel claim by Gary McDonald on the estate of his deceased parents.

McDonald's mother and father died in 2010 and 2013 respectively. Since then, he and his five siblings have been in dispute over the distribution of their parents' estates, with McDonald's brothers and sisters resisting his claim to the bulk of the estates on the basis of promises made to him by his parents. According to McDonald, his parents assured him several times over the years that he would receive the bulk of the estate assets if he continued to work for the family farming business in Wales.

The trial was heard first in Cardiff in February 2018 by Jarman HHJ, who decided against McDonald, largely on the basis of his findings of fact from evidence given by many witnesses. McDonald appealed, and although his appeal was in principle time-barred, the EWCA has issued a decision explaining why it has refused to hear it.

Essentially, the appellate court agreed with the first instance judge that McDonald's claims were unlikely to be correct. They accepted the evidence of McDonald's siblings that the parents had often told them that they would all share in the estate, and this was backed up the evidence of the parents' friends. Evidence given by McDonald's wife did not help his case, as she stated only that his parents had said 'they would make sure he was looked after'.

McDonald's parents sold the farm in 1997 without giving him any of the GBP8.4 million proceeds. Furthermore, later on he had settled down with a family of his own and a separate job, and, from 2006, built up his own business, so it was not a case of a family member working their whole adult life on the farm for little recompense.

Jarman's judgment, which the EWCA accepted, was that the balance tipped firmly against the assurances being in the terms claimed by McDonald.

'The applicant can show no grounds on which an appeal against the judge's findings of fact ... has any real prospect of success', said the EWCA in its judgment. It duly refused him permission to appeal.

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Published on our website on Thursday, 17 January, 2019