Harris & Co

Lawyer plundered his ailing aunts' £400,000 estate by changing their wills and 'decimating' their bank accounts

A solicitor plundered the estate of his elderly aunts and changed their wills when they were in hospital, a court heard yesterday.

Michael Harris took advantage of the poor health of Hannah Harris and Rosette Harris Emmanuel to claim a third of their £400,000 estate.

He is also accused of using the power of attorney the two women granted him to empty their bank accounts.

Both disliked him and wanted all their money to go to his niece and nephew.

Yesterday a judge at the High Court in London overturned both new wills, saying there was considerable doubt that either woman had the capacity to agree to the changes.

But the court heard that the siblings, Sara Cushway and Sebastian Elliot, are unlikely to receive any money because their uncle decimated the estate and is now bankrupt.

Instead, they will have to apply to a fund which compensates victims of dishonest solicitors.

The elderly sisters – both former nurses living together in Southsea, Hampshire – were in hospital in failing health in January 2006 when Harris drafted the new wills.

Rosette died of cancer just two weeks later at the age of 84, while her sister, who was showing signs of Alzheimer’s, died a year later at 91.

Their great-niece and great-nephew challenged the wills as well as Harris’s alleged frittering away of their two-thirds share.

Their barrister, Thomas Dumont, said the siblings had been very close to their great-aunts and both the women – especially Hannah – disliked Harris.

He claimed that after obtaining power of attorney over the two women Harris immediately removed £15,000 from each of their bank accounts.

‘He thereafter further bled his aunts and their two estates, by raising dishonest invoices, which he kept secret from them, from the beneficiaries of their estates, and from the claimants in this action,’ Mr Dumont added. ‘In my 30 years of practice I’ve seen some pretty remarkable behaviour, but this is at the top of the echelon.’

Harris, 75, is understood to have tried to use his aunts’ assets to prop up his Southsea practice.

He had challenged the claim of his niece and nephew but now ‘consented to judgment in the actions against him’, the judge, Mr Justice Henderson, said.

In overturning both wills, the judge pointed out that by the time they were drafted the elderly sisters were unable to read.

‘There is also considerable doubt about whether Hannah, at least, had testamentary capacity at that date, because the perception of those who knew her was that she had been suffering for some time from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease,’ he added.

The judge instead ruled in favour of two earlier documents that split the sisters’ estates equally between the siblings.

Neither Mrs Cushway, 44, who runs a farm in France, or Mr Elliot, 40, a financier in New York, was in court, and nor was their uncle. But their mother, Michelle Elliot, who is married to a cousin of Harris, attended and said she was relieved by the outcome.

Asked about the two wills after the ruling she said simply: ‘Hannah always disliked Michael intensely.’

The judge stressed that claims that Harris had ‘misappropriated’ his aunts’ accounts had not been proved because no evidence had been tested in court. But he said that, if substantiated, it represented ‘a very serious case of fraud’.

After giving judgment, the judge directed that the case papers be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Harris, who practised in Southsea, is bankrupt and was last year suspended for two years by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal for breaching a series of rules relating to accounts, costs and professional conduct. Last night Mrs Cushway said she had no idea of her uncle’s involvement until after her aunts’ deaths.

She added: ‘We never stopped believing that eventually we would be able to prove what we knew instinctively – that our great aunts, whom we loved, would never have made wills in the form Michael Harris drafted for them.’

Her brother said: ‘We believed wholeheartedly we were doing the right thing in pursuing this case, which was both expensive and draining – we believe it’s what our aunts would have wanted.’

Michelle Elliot questioned why the disciplinary finding that Harris had ‘preyed on vulnerable people’ had not in itself rendered the wills invalid, forcing them into the expensive process of going to court.

Mr Harris declined to comment.

By James Tozer. Daily Mail, 18 May 2012