In 2018, the mistress of the late Indian businessman, Baldev Kohli, entered into a court battle with her lover’s widow after their child was left out of his £2.5million Will.
Melissa Proles, a HR executive, began a relationship with Mr Kohli, whom she met at an exclusive tennis club. He proposed to her soon after, and they lived together until six months before their daughter was born in 2013. Mr Kohli was not present at the birth of their daughter, having only been informed of the event via email, and did not meet her until she was five weeks old. However, he showered his daughter with gifts and funded her nursery school place.
After being diagnosed with cancer, Mr Kohli returned to India in October 2014, where he died the following year, aged 59.
In his final Will, the businessman left his entire fortune, made in pharmaceuticals and property investment, to Harjeet Kaur Kohli, his wife of 35 years. Mrs Kohli denied she had been separated or ‘estranged’ from her husband and stated that she had cared for him in his final days. Mrs Kohli insisted her marriage had not ended and told the court they had taken a romantic balloon ride when she visited him in Weybridge in 2014.
Ms Proles asked the court to grant her four-year-old daughter 'reasonable financial provision' from Mr Kohli's estate, pursuant to the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975. Ms Proles claimed that Mr Kohli had substantial ties to the UK, having set up two gourmet Indian restaurants and owning a portfolio of properties around Surrey and West London. Mrs Kohli, however, insisted that when Mr Kohli returned to India in October 2015, 'he never intended to come back' to the UK.
The evidence suggested that Mr Kohli enjoyed something of a double life; he had remained engaged with, and provided for, his family in India, while forming romances in the UK. It was for the court to decide whether Mr Kohli’s ‘double life’ was sufficient to constitute the deliberate and unequivocal abandonment of a domicile of origin.
For such a claim to succeed, Ms Proles’ lawyers had to prove that Mr Kohli was domiciled in England at the date of his death. Accordingly, Mrs Kohli’s lawyers fought a preliminary battle to try to convince the court that he remained domiciled in India. Had this proved successful then the child’s claim would have ended, whatever its merits. Unfortunately for them, Judge Clark ruled that the “tapestry of his life” had moved to England before he died to the extent that he was domiciled here. Mrs Kohli’s lawyers had played what they may have regarded as their trump card and lost, so strengthening Ms Proles’ child’s claim. With hindsight, would Mrs Kohli have been better advised to mediate and use the risk of succeeding with her domicile challenge to produce a lower settlement?
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