A Coventry property owner who has been fighting for more than 10 years over a portfolio that might have been fraudulently transferred from her by relatives has won the right to have her case reheard after a judge ruled that her signature on a contract had been forged.
Takhar v Gracefield Developments Ltd has already been all they way through the judicial system to the Supreme Court and is now on a return journey.
The case centres on a portfolio of five properties in Coventry originally owned by appellant Balber Takhar that she transferred to a company called Gracefield owned by her and two relatives on the understanding that they would manage, renovate and rent them.
However, she said that she was removed from the company, leaving her without the properties, while her relatives, Kewal and Parkash Krishan, said they had a joint venture agreement in place to split the profits between them and her.
The case went to trial in the spring of 2010. Just before it started, the Krishans produced a photocopy of a document that appeared to be a profit-sharing agreement. Takhar said she had not signed the document and asked for the court to allow her to use a handwriting expert to analyse whether the signature was really hers. The court refused, and she lost the overall case.
After the judgment, a handwriting expert concluded that the signature was not hers. This led to a battle though the Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court over whether she could use this to challenge the ruling. The Krishans argued that to do so would be an abuse of process as she could have done it before the original trial. But in March last year, the Supreme Court disagreed and said she could.
This led to a trail in September and October this year in Birmingham in which Takhar asked the court to set aside the original ruling against her.
The judge who heard the case, Steven Gasztowicz QC, agreed in a ruling that has just been handed down.
“It is common ground that if I find that the claimant’s signature was forged on any document, that the defendants have responsibility for that, and that the forgery was material to the outcome of the original claim, I must set aside the judgment,” he said in his ruling.
“This is in line with the decision of the Supreme Court in this case.”
Takhar’s expert concluded that the signature on the agreement was identical to, and therefore lifted from, another document in the case. Lawyers for the Krishans did not dispute this, but suggested that the lawyers who worked on the deal might have lost the real agreement and “transposed” a signature to cover it up.
This, said the judge, was “most unlikely”.
“It would elevate an act of negligence (which had never been alleged) into a serious fraud and attempt to pervert the course of justice (which if discovered would have been added on top of such negligence),” he said. And, he said, if the lawyers were going to be dishonest, they would simply say they never received the document in the first place.
“I am satisfied, on the balance of probabilities, that not only did the defendants have strong motive, and opportunity, to forge the document by transposition of the claimant’s signature onto it from elsewhere (and that there is no evidence or sufficient reason to think that anyone at X did so), but that they did do so,” he said.
He ruled that the judgment that sparked the case should be set aside.
There is still a legal battle ahead. The Krishans could seek to appeal this ruling. If they do not, or the court rejects their appeal, there will be another High Court trail of the main issue. And that, in itself, could be subject to an appeal.
Balber Kaur Takhar v (1) Gracefield Developments Ltd (2) Dr Kewal Singh Krishan (3) Mrs Parkash Krishan
Mr John Wardell QC and Mr Lee Jia Wei (instructed by Tanners Solicitors LLP) for the claimant; Mr Joseph Sullivan (instructed by Gowling WLG (UK) LLP) for the defendants
Birmingham Civil Justice Centre (Mr Steven Gasztowicz QC Sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge) 23 October 2020
