The battle for the fortune of the Lyndhurst Hotel owner

PLUS: A new future beckons for the delayed Stanley Buildings scheme

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This week we look at the disputed will of a Blackpool hotelier - who appeared to have left his daughter out of his will in favour of a lodger.

That will has now been challenged with claims the lodger used a struck-off solicitor to create the ruse.

We’ve also looked at where the upgrade of the Art Deco-styled Stanley Buildings in the town centre is up to - as the £7.5m scheme nears the final stages.

Blackpool hotelier’s will left everything to a lodger - and ignored his daughter - but now it won’t be recognised

Lyndhurst Hotel

By Michael Holmes

A lodger has failed to convince a judge that a Blackpool hotelier’s will - which left everything to him and cut the dead man’s daughter out of his £900,000 fortune - was real.

Monir Shaikh’s only child Mosammat Khatun sued Shamim Hasan, the will’s sole beneficiary, and Rajesh Pathania, the will’s executor and one of the witnesses to its signing, challenging the document’s validity.

The mother-of-three claimed Hasan sneaked into her dead father’s room to get his paperwork before enlisting struck-off solicitor Pathania to help him forge the will.

Hasan and Pathania denied the allegations - with Hasan saying Shaikh, 64, who is believed to have owned the Lyndhurst Hotel in Station Road, treated him like a son and wanted him to inherit his estate.

But after hearing from a number of witnesses, Caroline Shea KC, sitting in the High Court, ruled that the circumstances surrounding the will were “sufficient to arouse suspicion” and raised “significant doubt in my mind that the disputed will is genuine”.

She wrote in her judgement: “To conclude, the defendants have failed to establish on the balance of probabilities that the disputed will was genuine.”

Shaikh was born in April 1956 and moved to the UK in the early 1990s, having been a lawyer in the Supreme Court of Bangladesh.

He was called to the English bar in 2008 and became a practising solicitor in the UK in 2013, setting up PGA Solicitors with another partner.

But he was also a property magnate, owning 47 Cumberland Road in Newham, East London; two flats in Tilbury, east London; and the Blackpool hotel.

Shaikh suffered from major health issues, including heart problems, diabetes, asthma and kidney concerns, the court was told, and was admitted to hospital on March 26 2020 - the first day of the national Covid-related lockdown.

After being put on life support, he died on April 7 2020 from multiple organ failure and Covid, with chronic kidney disease and high blood pressure contributing to his death.

Monir Shaikh

Following Shaikh’s death, his alleged will emerged - and was challenged by Khatun who, according to court papers, said it was “inherently improbable that Mr Shaikh would have bequeathed his entire estate to Mr Hasan, depriving her of any part in his estate”.

“She says she enjoyed a good relationship with Mr Shaikh, and was unaware, or only dimly aware, of the existence of Mr Hasan,” Judge Shea said.

Hasan, however, said he “enjoyed a very close relationship with Mr Shaikh, akin to that of a close family member, and that Mr Shaikh was in effect estranged from Ms Khatun”.

Hasan said he grew close to Shaikh, whom he called “Uncle”, after meeting him in the mid-2010s, providing legal cases involving car crashes to PGA.

He also worked on the cases, being paid a percentage of the revenue, and trained PGA workers on case management.

He also had a number of other business interests, the court was told, managing a car hire firm, owning an IT business, working as an agent with Virgin Airlines and renting cars to Uber drivers among others.

He later moved into 47 Cumberland Road, occupying the ground floor with his then-pregnant wife while Shaikh occupied the top floor, with both sharing the downstairs kitchen.

The tenor of his evidence, Judge Shea said, was that “over time he became very close indeed to Mr Shaikh, who treated him like a close relative, and right-hand man, and who intended that all his properties were to be made over to Mr Hasan”.

Hasan said he only became aware of the will’s existence weeks after Shaikh’s death, when Pathania, who said he was also a close friend of Shaikh, knocked on his door.

The court also heard from a number of witnesses, as well as testimony from handwriting expert Ruth Myers, a forensic analyst who said there “is strong evidence” that Shaikh’s signature on his will was forged.

Tapan Pandit, a solicitor-cum-property investor who said he was Shaikh’s closest friend and was involved in his ventures, including in Blackpool, said the latter “came to him regularly to discuss his business affairs amongst other things and to seek advice”.

He told the court he knew Shaikh “A to Z” and “was adamant that Mr Shaikh would have told him had he intended to execute a will”, Judge Shea said.

She continued: “Of considerable significance is the fact that Mr Pandit says that he spent the evening of September 19 2019, the date of the alleged execution of the disputed will, with Mr Shaikh, whom he met ‘after the office’ and stayed with until midnight going through a long discussion about Mr Shaikh’s financial affairs.

“That is the same evening on which the defendants claim the disputed will was executed by Mr Shaikh.”

The judge conceded that Shaikh could have met with Pandit after signing his will.

But she raised other serious concerns about the legal document, which contained spelling mistakes.

Clause three said: “I have a daughter but have no relationship with her and I live (sic) nothing to her.”

While clause 12 misspelled the daughter’s middle name as “Sapna” rather than “Shapna”.

The judge wrote: “The disputed will as a whole does not present as the work of an accomplished lawyer.”

She added: “An anomaly on which Ms Khatun placed particular reliance was the misspelling of her name. This was said to be an unlikely mistake for a father to make, and it was further suggested that the written form appearing in the disputed will was ‘perhaps’ closer to an Indian spelling than a Bangladeshi one, the implication being that such a mistake is more likely to have been made by Mr Pathania, whose origins lie closer to India than to Bangladesh, than by Mr Shaikh who had no Indian association or background.”

But what rang major alarm bells for the judge was a clause in the will leaving Shaikh’s Pakistani properties to Hasan - because he did not have any.

Judge Shea said: “This would have been an inexplicable mistake for Mr Shaikh himself to have made…”

“It is hard to understand why Mr Shaikh would have included reference to properties owned in Pakistan in the disputed will,” she wrote, concluding: “The most likely answer is that the disputed will was not written by him, or at his direction, or with his knowledge.

“If I had any hesitation (which I do not) in reaching my conclusion that the defendants had failed to discharge the burden of proof, this last factor would seal such a conclusion.”

The judge criticised the lack of evidence produced by Hasan and Pathania, including telephone records to support the claim Shaikh had called on Pathania to draft and execute the will; and computer records, hard drive analyses, cloud data or metadata to support the claim Shaik drafted the will on his computer.

Judge Shea said that messages between Hasan and Shaikh showed “nothing in my judgement that elevates the messages out of the sphere of a close and broadly friendly working relationship into the realm of Mr Shaikh’s closest (quasi-) family member”.

The fact that Hasan lived in the same building as Shaikh did not, the judge said, prove “the kind of close relationship which would lead Mr Shaikh to bequeath his entire estate to Mr Hasan”.

While Khatun denied a rift between her and her father, producing family photographs of him with her children - his grandchildren - and saying she went on regular holidays with him and their wider family to Blackpool, the judge said it was “difficult to reach any firm conclusions about the nature” of the pair’s relationship.

She wrote: “I do not consider that the defendants have established on the balance of probabilities that they were estranged; equally, were the onus to have fallen on her, I do not consider she has produced sufficient evidence to show that they were still on friendly and familiar terms.

“But in any event, I do not need to decide that issue, since the issue is not determinative. Even if, as the defendants maintain, Mr Khatun was estranged from Mr Shaikh, it does not follow that he must perforce have decided to execute a will in Mr Hasan’s favour, and leave her completely out of any inheritance.

“The defendants must prove the genuineness of the disputed will on the balance of probabilities, and my finding that they have failed to do so is unconnected to the state of Ms Khatun’s relationship with her father.”

A follow-up hearing will be held to determine the next steps, the judge decided.

Pathania, the estate’s executor, told the court that since legal proceedings started “he has done nothing further regarding the administration of the estate, other than receive rental income into a bank account and perform necessary repairs to the UK properties in Mr Shaikh’s ownership at his death”.

Khatun’s barrister Dilan Deeljur was quoted by a national newspaper as the case got underway last year.

He told a court: “Mrs Khatun’s claim is that Mr Hasan has used his position as a short-term lodger at the deceased’s property to infiltrate a store of documents that the deceased kept there.

“He has used these documents to create a fake or sham will to his benefit.”

He asked Hasan: “There isn’t any way Mr Shaikh would have left you all his assets, is there?”

Hasan replied: “It was his wish.”

The barrister also asked why Shaikh would have appointed Pathania, who he said was struck off in 2010 for a “conflict of interest”, as his sole executor when there was little evidence of them having a close relationship.

He told Pathania: “I am going to suggest to you that you have planned this with Mr Hasan. You planned this after Mr Shaikh died and you have done this to make money.”

Pathania responded: “No, sir. This will is real.”

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Project to transform Stanley Buildings set for completion after delays

Stanley Buildings in Blackpool

By Richard Hunt

A £7.5m project to transform a historic building in Blackpool into a hub for small businesses is to be officially launched next month.