A woman who challenged the procedure to get her father to sign a new will four days before he died of Covid has succeeded in having the document declared invalid.
Daniele du Plessis told the Mpumalanga High Court she was concerned her father was coerced into signing a document he would not have agreed to, that he would not have left his children without an inheritance nor got the names of his grandchildren wrong.
Deputy judge president Vincent Ratshibvumo found the will was not correctly authorised and ruled against widow Francina Reniers, who argued the document was valid and correctly witnessed.
When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, South Africa went into lockdown.
“The devastating impact of this pandemic and all the sad memories it left behind came back to life in the facts of this application,” Ratshibvumo said.
“Patrick Marie Stanislas Henri Reniers [the deceased] and his wife of 15 years, Francina Elizabetha Reniers, came face to face with the hardship when in July 2021, they both contracted the virus.
“The deceased was immediately admitted at Mediclinic Hospital, Mbombela, but [his wife] was not so lucky, as there were no more beds for her. She resorted to self-medication at home. As fate would have it, she lived to see another day while her husband succumbed to the virus on July 30 2021,” said Ratshibvumo.
He said the couple had realised they might not survive and decided to write a joint will. The court heard that a financial adviser of the Liberty Standard Bank Group drafted the will, had it printed and delivered to Francina Reniers. He instructed her to sign it in the presence of two witnesses, along with her husband.
His daughter found it hard to accept that her father would leave nothing to her or his other children.
She signed the document at home in White River in the presence of an Outsurance broker who then took it to her husband in hospital.
He signed all three pages without reading them.
The broker then signed the will and filled in the date and place. He noted Reniers was weak.
The broker took the document home where his wife cosigned as second witness in the absence of the Reniers. The document was then returned to the wife who believed it was a valid joint will.
After Patrick Reniers died, the document was presented to the Master of the High Court by his widow and accepted as his last will.
However, his daughter was aggrieved by the court’s acceptance of the will, finding it hard to accept that her father would leave nothing to her or his other children.
A previous will dated July 1987 listed all of his children as beneficiaries.
Added to Du Plessis’s concerns were inaccuracies in the new will she believed did not accurately reflect her father’s wishes.
The first inaccuracy lay in reference to the couple’s marriage contract. Their prenuptial contract dated May 2006 showed they were married out of community of property without accrual, while the joint will classified the marriage as having been out of community of property but with accrual.
The second concern lay in how Patrick Reniers’s four grandchildren were nominated as conditional beneficiaries.
The judge said one of them was listed with the wrong surname and the first name of a second was incorrectly spelt. Francina Reniers admitted to the inaccuracies but dismissed them as “typos”.
Du Plessis was also concerned that while her father had named all his other grandchildren as beneficiaries, he left out her son.
Francina Reniers said that was deliberate as he never saw or met the boy.
Du Plessis also challenged the validity of the joint will as it was not signed in the presence of two witnesses and asked that it be declared void and disregarded by the estate administrators.
Francina Reniers opposed the application and asked the court to condone her and her husband’s noncompliance with the witness signature requirements, and declare the joint will valid.
Ratshibvumo noted that neither the deceased nor his wife signed the will in the presence of two witnesses.
He found the joint will did not comply with the formalities required to make it legal, that it was not signed in the presence of two witnesses and in the presence of the testators.
The joint will was declared invalid. Francina Reniers’s counter application was dismissed and she was ordered to pay the costs of the case.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.