A mother and son are suing each other after she threw him out of the £1.2million family home and changed the locks.
Elizabeth
Ashley, 79, kicked her son out of the house two years ago and has not
allowed him back, despite his insistence that he paid for most of it.
Mitchim
Ashley, 53, says he has a legal right to live in his childhood home –
which has risen in price by a staggering £1million since they bought it –
and is demanding he be allowed to return.
Court
fight: A mother and son are suing each other after she barred him from
her £1.2million home - despite Mitchim Ashley (left) paying in cash for
three-quarters of the purchase price for his mother Elizabeth, 79
(right)
The pair are now suing each other at Central London County Court over the property in Wandsworth, south-west London.
Mr Ashley is demanding that his mother either allows him to return home or sells the house and halves the profits with him.
Mrs
Ashley is arguing that she has the right to decide who lives in her
home and is seeking damages for alleged harassment by her estranged son.
Yesterday,
the court heard that the property had been the family home for nearly
four decades before the row. Mrs Ashley had been renting the property
but in 2001 she bought it jointly with her son for just £200,000.
Mrs
Ashley paid only £5,000, with her son, an electrician currently living
in Hastings, East Sussex, contributing £150,000 in cash and acting as
guarantor for a £45,000 mortgage in his mother’s name, the court heard.
A deed of trust was drawn up between them at the time of the purchase, stating that they each owned half of the house.
Bargain: The terraced home in Wansdworth, south west London, cost just £200,000 in 2001
Joshua Swirsky, for Mr Ashley, said his client’s mother was being ‘unreasonable’.
‘The
trigger for the litigation was Mrs Ashley’s decision to change the
locks to the property when her son said he wanted to spend more time
there,’ he said.
‘The
purpose of the trust was to provide a home for Mr Ashley, as well as
Mrs Ashley, and he indeed occupied the property between 2001 and his
exclusion in 2012.’
Criticising
Mrs Ashley’s ‘unreasonable refusal to allow him to resume occupation’,
Mr Swirsky told the judge that, in the event that it is impossible for
Mr Ashley to return to the house, his client wants it sold and the
proceeds split.
‘If
it is impossible for him to live at the property, the purpose for which
the trust was created has come to an end and the court can make an
order for sale,’ he said.
‘This
is a situation where there is over £1million of equity in the property,
and each occupier would be entitled to at least £500,000 on sale.
‘That should be enough to accommodate two people separately, even in London in 2014.’
The deed details the rights of occupancy and it is the interpretation of this that has led to the court case.
Mr Ashley said he helped to purchase the home so that his mother would have ‘somewhere safe to see out her days’.
But
Mr Swirsky said the deed of trust was also supposed to be an investment
that he would inherit after his mother’s death. Mrs Ashley claims that
the deed was intended to provide a home for the rest of her life just
for her. When her son said he’d like to ‘spend more time there’, the
pair began rowing.
By
December 2012, she had banished him from the home and changed the locks
after he allegedly allowed strangers to lodge in the house, the court
heard.
Battle: The county court hearing took place inside the Royal Courts of Justice (pictured) in central London
Mr
Swirsky, on claims that his client had harassed his mother, said: ‘The
allegations consist of a number of telephone calls, a single instance of
unspecified abuse in person, and a malicious call to the RSPCA.’
David
Hyde, for Mrs Ashley, said she was within her rights to prevent her son
living in the home. ‘There is evidence that Mr Ashley allowed strangers
into the house as lodgers,’ he said.
He also argued that Mr Ashley had no right to occupy the house under the trust deed.
Judge Diana Faber reserved her judgment following the three-day hearing and will give her decision at a later date.
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