Pooja Bedi gets a big win in her legal battle over family property

In a major relief to actress Pooja Bedi and her two maternal aunts  after 20 years, the former Bigg Boss contestant succeeded in proving that the purported will of late Bipin Gupta (Bedi’s uncle) was forged by two strangers to usurp his properties which include a flat in Firdaus Building on Marine Drive and a two-acre plot in Panchgani. Justice Milind Jadhav on Tuesday dismissed a testamentary petition filed by Vasant Sardal seeking to execute Gupta’s will dated September 4, 2003. In the will, the deceased wrote his entire estate off to a charitable trust controlled by two strangers, who were named as executors. While dismissing the petition, Justice Jadhav refused to accept the genuineness of the will and noted that Gupta’s signature on the three pages did not match. The court also said that there was lack of evidence regarding who drafted the three-page will when Gupta was admitted to Bombay Hospital for treatment of renal failure and hip fracture. Besides, the document appeared abnormal since half of its second page was blank while the execution part was on the third page.By this order, Bedi gets one-third share in the estate and the remaining will go to her late mother Protima Bedi’s sisters – Ashita Tham and Monica Uberoi.“As a family we are so delighted with the ultimate judgement,” Pooja Bedi said while reacting to the verdict. “A big thank you to justice Jadhav who was taken aback by all the developments and time zones and logically and carefully went through the details and put an end to our 20-year predicament.”

It all began in 2004 when Vasant Sardal, one of the two executors named in the will, approached the high court seeking probate of the will purportedly executed on June 20, 2003. The will submitted by Sardal was purportedly executed when Gupta was admitted to Bombay Hospital after he suffered renal failure and hip fracture. He eventually died in September 2003. The will, which named Vasant Sardal and Behram Ardeshir, who later renounced his executorship, was signed by Sardal’s son Anil, a serving police officer, and advocate Santosh Raje as witnesses. As per the will, a trust would be set up in the name of his wife, Pushpa Gupta Charitable Trust, and this trust would inherit all of Gupta’s properties – tenancy rights in a flat in Firdaus Building, an Art Deco structure, a flat in Neel Tarang building in Mahim, a two-acre plot in Panchgani, bank balances, investments in shares and bonds, and movable assets like valuables in his possession. Since the will stipulated that the executors were to be the trustees of the proposed trust, they were indirectly authorised to control Gupta’s entire estate.

Justice Jadhav, however, refused to accept the will as a valid and genuinely executed document after noticing several discrepancies and abnormalities. Giving an example, he said, the will said Gupta had no close relatives and therefore he was bequeathing his entire estate to charity, but he did have three sisters and their children. “In the will an obscure bequest is made to charity in the name of a charitable trust to be controlled by the two executors who are complete strangers and third parties and not even closely related to the testator, Bipin Gupta,” the judge said while rejecting the probate petition. “Thus, there is an indirect bequest in favour of the executors and one of the attesting witnesses namely Anil Sardal, who appears to be the mastermind of this entire conspiracy.”The court said the disposition in the will was “on the face of record unnatural and obscure” and the Sardal father-son duo were the direct beneficiaries, after Ardeshir’s renunciation. The bench also took note of the fact that Ardeshir had said that Sardal and his son “had a clear intention of usurping the estate of the testator, Bipin Gupta.”Justice Jadhav also took note of a May 2018 order by which Sardal was removed as an executor of the will by another judge after he noticed that he was too old, feeble and infirm to perform the duty of an executor and “in fact his son Anil Sardal was instrumental in taking all decisions”.The bench also noticed that the execution of the will was not in compliance with requirements of section 63 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925, as advocate Raje said that he had not seen Gupta sign the undated document.To make things worse, while Raje claimed that he had signed the will as a witness and handed it back to Gupta, the document was found in the lawyer’s possession after his death, the judge pointed out.