Rita Kishinchand Bhojwani v HVS Properties Pte Ltd and others [2025] SGHC 80

Introduction

The plaintiff in this action (“the Plaintiff”) is the daughter of the second defendant (“D2”). D2 had two children with her husband, Kishinchand Tiloomal Bhojwani (“KTB”), being the Plaintiff and her older brother, Sunil Kishinchand Bhojwani (“Sunil”). The first defendant is a family company (“the Company”) that was controlled by KTB. Both D2 and the third defendant, who is also known as Cindy, were the directors of the Company at the material time. The term “Defendants” is used in this judgment to refer collectively to the Company, D2 and Cindy.

One of the assets owned by the Company is an apartment in a condominium development called “Seafront on Meyer” (“the Apartment”). While the Plaintiff was not the legal owner of the Apartment, she stayed there with D2 and KTB for many years. However, on 25 August 2021, the Plaintiff was evicted from the Apartment pursuant to two board resolutions of the Company signed by D2 and Cindy in their capacity as the Company’s directors. The Plaintiff’s case was that it was Sunil who orchestrated the eviction, as he wielded significant influence over their mother and was regarded by Cindy (whom the Plaintiff claimed had been appointed by Sunil to the Company’s board ) as the “boss”. As at the time of the eviction, D2 was 87 years of age, while KTB was 93.

Aggrieved, the Plaintiff brought the present suit against the Defendants, claiming that she had a right to remain in the Apartment. By this action, the Plaintiff sought various remedies, including an injunction to restore her to possession of the Apartment and restrain any further breaches of her right to stay there. She also sought damages for the tort of conspiracy and for dishonest assistance. The Plaintiff did not bring Sunil into this action as a defendant. KTB, who had already lost his mental capacity by the start of trial for this suit, was also not a party to the action.

On 28 January 2025, I dismissed the Plaintiff’s claim in its entirety and gave oral reasons. I now give detailed reasons explaining my decision.

Background

The Company was incorporated in Singapore by KTB, sometime in 1968. From the point of the Company’s inception, D2 served as a director, stepping down only on 8 March 2019. On or about 13 August 2021, being a little over a week prior to the signing of the board resolutions evicting the Plaintiff, D2 was re-instated as a director of the Company. The other director of the Company, Cindy, held the position of director since 28 November 2019.

The Company has two million issued shares. In 1984, 30,000 of these shares were transferred to the Plaintiff and, in 1994, a further 50,000 shares were transferred to her, bringing her total shareholdings at the time to 80,000. In 2013, the Plaintiff transferred these shares back to KTB. Sometime in 2019, D2 stepped down as director and both D2 and KTB transferred all two million shares in the Company to Sunil. In December of that same year, Sunil transferred the shares to an entity known as Kensington Trust Singapore Limited, which administers a trust that parties referred to as the “Kensington Trust” and which presently still holds all the shares in the Company. According to the trustees of the Kensington Trust, the beneficiaries of the trust are Sunil’s wife and a charity known as the Desmoid Foundation.

In 1985, the Plaintiff married her husband, Kirpalani Deepak Govindran. They have one child, Karan Deepak Kirpalani (“Karan”). Sometime in 1994, after about a decade of marriage, the Plaintiff and her son Karan moved to her parents’ home at the time, at 6 Peach Garden, Singapore (“the Peach Garden Property”). In 2006, the Plaintiff commenced proceedings against her husband by way of summons MSS 1791/2006, in which she sought maintenance from him. Despite the matrimonial disputes, the Plaintiff and her husband remain married to this day, while living apart.

In 2007, the Company purchased the Apartment. Three years later, in 2010, the Plaintiff and her parents moved into the Apartment, where she resided until her eviction. Upon moving to the Apartment in 2010, D2 had signed a tenancy agreement with the Company (which was the legal owner of the Apartment), under which D2 would pay a monthly rent of S$6,000 to the Company. D2 also tendered copies of subsequent tenancy agreements signed between D2 and the Company to show that the tenancy was renewed successively every two or three years, up to the point of the Plaintiff’s eviction.

The dynamics between the family members in this case were atypical, in that they often resorted to litigation to resolve their differences. By way of example, KTB was involved in the following disputes with his children:

(a) In 2003, the Company (at KTB’s behest) commenced HC/S 1212/2003 against Sunil in relation to a property at Ardmore Park belonging to the Company and which Sunil was staying in. The Company sought (amongst other remedies) possession of the Ardmore Park property and payment of rent. The action was discontinued the following year, in October 2004.

(b) Sometime in January 2014, the Plaintiff took out a mortgage over a property at 201 Tanjong Rhu Road #06-04 (“the Parkshore Property”), which was held in the Plaintiff’s name. The mortgage was to secure a credit facility extended to Karan’s company, Specialist Cars Pte Ltd (“Specialist Cars”). KTB objected to the mortgage, claiming that the Parkshore Property was held on trust for him by the Plaintiff, who consequently had no right to encumber it to finance her son’s business. KTB had thus commenced HC/S 186/2014 against the Plaintiff, Karan and Specialist Cars. This action was settled in March 2014 by way of a settlement agreement where the Plaintiff undertook (among other things) not to incur further liabilities against the Parkshore Property.

The Plaintiff was also embroiled in various legal disputes with Sunil – these formed the backdrop to the eviction in this suit:

(a) On 2 March 2021, the Plaintiff filed an originating summons in the Family Justice Courts to appoint herself as deputy for KTB (“the Deputyship Application”). Unbeknownst to her, Sunil had already been granted a Lasting Power of Attorney (“LPA”) by KTB to manage the latter’s affairs. Both Sunil and D2 resisted the Deputyship Application.

(b) On 10 March 2021, the Plaintiff filed an application seeking a personal protection order (“PPO”) against Sunil (“the PPO Proceedings”), alleging that he had committed family violence against her during an incident on 23 January 2021. D2 filed an affidavit in support of Sunil, attesting that he did not hurt the Plaintiff at all.

(c) On 14 May 2021, the Plaintiff filed an originating summons in the Family Justice Courts to set aside the LPA that had been granted by KTB to Sunil (“the LPA Challenge”). The Plaintiff’s case in the LPA Challenge was that KTB executed the LPA while under undue pressure from Sunil, or alternatively that KTB lacked mental capacity to execute the LPA. D2 applied to intervene in the LPA Challenge. D2 intervened in support of Sunil’s position in the proceedings. Pending resolution of the LPA Challenge, the Deputyship Application was stayed.

As seen from the list above, D2 consistently took the side of her son in the legal proceedings that her daughter commenced against him.

Amidst the courtroom tussles detailed in the preceding paragraph, the eviction happened. The PPO Proceedings had been fixed for trial over two days, on 25 and 26 August 2021. Two days before the trial, ie, on 23 August 2021, both D2 and Cindy (in their capacities as directors of the Company) passed the following two board resolutions (“the Board Resolutions”) to evict the Plaintiff from the Apartment:

(a) The first resolution limited the occupants of the Apartment to KTB, D2 and the three helpers.

(b) The second resolution (among other things) barred the Plaintiff from dwelling in the Apartment with immediate effect and authorised the Company’s lawyers to deal with the eviction.

According to the Plaintiff, KTB’s loss of mental capacity had already ensued by this point.

On the evening of 25 August, ie, at the end of the first day of trial of the PPO Proceedings, the Plaintiff returned to the Apartment only to find herself blocked from entry. The condominium’s security guard had been engaged by the Company to record the incident and prevent her from entering the Apartment. A lawyer representing the Company was also present. Most of the Plaintiff’s belongings from within the Apartment had been packed into boxes and lined along the corridor outside the Apartment. As the Plaintiff was not able to cart these boxes away at short notice, the Company subsequently arranged for the boxes to be moved to a warehouse where she could retrieve them later.

Following the eviction, the legal proceedings commenced by the Plaintiff were successively concluded as follows:

(a) On the second day of the trial of the PPO Proceedings, ie, 26 August 2021 (being the day after the eviction), the hearing did not proceed. Instead, the trial was postponed to October 2021. However, that subsequent tranche of the trial ultimately did not proceed as the Plaintiff withdrew the PPO Proceedings (with no order as to costs).

(b) In March 2022, the LPA Challenge was dismissed by the Family Court. The Plaintiff’s appeal against the dismissal was dismissed by the High Court in December 2022. The Plaintiff’s application for leave to appeal against the High Court’s decision was also dismissed, with costs.

(c) In March 2023, the Plaintiff filed a summons within the Deputyship Application seeking the court’s leave to amend the reliefs sought. This was dismissed. Consequently, in June 2023, the Plaintiff withdrew the Deputyship Application, with the court ordering her to pay costs to Sunil.

Parties’ cases in the present action

I now set out the parties’ respective cases in this trial.

Plaintiff’s case

The recurring theme running through the Plaintiff’s case was that Sunil had procured D2 and Cindy to act against her. Apart from engineering the eviction, the Plaintiff contended that Sunil also manipulated D2 into taking his side and opposing the Plaintiff in the legal proceedings described above.

As regards the eviction, the Plaintiff claimed that her removal was unlawful because she had a right to remain in the Apartment. That right arose from an “express and/or implied arrangement or understanding” between the Plaintiff, her parents and the Company (“Arrangement / Understanding”), under which the Plaintiff and her parents would be allowed to stay in the Apartment without paying any rent to the Company. Undergirding the Plaintiff’s case was her claim that a representation had made sometime in or around 2010, after she and her parents moved to the Apartment. As explained below, the contents of that representation and the circumstances under which it was made, as well as how that representation gave rise to the Arrangement / Understanding, were unclear.

The Plaintiff claimed that in reliance on the representation, she carried out the following acts to her detriment:

(a) She attended to the personal welfare of KTB and D2 on matters such as medical care and household affairs. In particular, she claimed to have served as her parents’ “primary caregiver”, bringing them for their medical appointments and driving them everywhere.

(b) She spent her time, effort and resources handling the administrative matters relating to the Apartment, including:

The Plaintiff also claimed that the resources which she invested into taking care of her parents and tending to the Apartment required her to forgo “meaningful, paid employment”, with the result that she sacrificed her financial independence.

During the trial, the Plaintiff also alleged that her reliance on the representation led her to incur various other categories of detriment that were not pleaded by her in the Statement of Claim (Amendment No. 1) (“SoC”):

(a) Firstly, she claimed that she had allowed a term loan of S$1m to be taken out against the Parkshore Property (referred to at [9(b)] above), with the loan monies being deployed for the Company’s operations. The Parkshore Property was then tenanted out to generate rental income that was used to service the loan. The Plaintiff claimed that she did not object to this arrangement, notwithstanding that it would prevent her from residing in the Parkshore Property, as she took comfort in the fact that she could (by virtue of the Arrangement / Understanding) reside in the Apartment.

(b) Secondly, the Plaintiff claimed that a unit in a condominium development called “The Sovereign” (“the Sovereign unit”) had been purchased under her name in 1998 and was meant to be her matrimonial home. She claimed that she had allowed the Sovereign unit to be sold to the Company in 2007, below market prices, on the faith that she could stay in the Apartment (by virtue of the Arrangement / Understanding). Had she known that she could be evicted at any time, she would have kept the Sovereign unit. She also claimed that she refrained from using her share of the proceeds from the sale of the Sovereign unit to buy a new residence for herself, given the impression that she could continue staying in the Apartment.

The Plaintiff claimed that given the above instances of detriment suffered by her, it would now be unconscionable for the Company to renege on the representation and the Arrangement / Understanding. Specifically, the Plaintiff contended that an irrevocable equitable interest in the Apartment had arisen in her favour, founded on proprietary estoppel or on a license coupled with equity, allowing her to reside in the Apartment for the rest of her life, rent-free.

Apart from the claim in equity, the Plaintiff also claimed that she had an irrevocable contractual licence to stay in the Apartment. According to the Plaintiff, the consideration for the contract underpinning the licence comprised the very same acts of detriment which she claimed to have performed in reliance on the representation underlying her claim in equity.

The Plaintiff further claimed that she had a bare licence to remain in the Apartment which could not be revoked without reasonable notice, although this was also not pleaded by her in the SoC.

Finally, the Plaintiff claimed that notwithstanding the transfer of the 80,000 shares back to KTB in 2013 (see [6] above), she retained a beneficial interest in these shares. In particular, she took the position that it was KTB who was the bare trustee, holding the shares on trust for her. The Plaintiff contended that her beneficial ownership of shares in the Company conferred upon her an interest in the Apartment, being an asset that was owned by the Company.

Following from the Plaintiff’s position that she had an equitable and contractual right to stay in the Apartment, she contended that the decision to evict her was wrongful. This in turn formed the basis for two additional claims brought by the Plaintiff.

The first additional claim was for conspiracy. The Plaintiff claimed that the Defendants had conspired to injure her, by both unlawful and lawful means. In particular, the Plaintiff alleged that Sunil had procured D2 and Cindy to sign the Board Resolutions evicting the Plaintiff, in violation of her equitable and contractual right to stay in the Apartment. The Plaintiff contended that the Defendants’ actions were “unlawful, fraudulent and dishonest” and carried out with the predominant intention of injuring her.

The Plaintiff’s second additional claim was for dishonest assistance. She alleged that D2 and Cindy had dishonestly assisted the Company to commit an unlawful act, being the violation of the Plaintiff’s right to stay in the Apartment, by improperly passing the Board Resolutions in breach of their duties as directors of the Company. The Plaintiff claimed that in procuring the Company to effect the unlawful eviction, D2 and Cindy had acted wrongfully or fraudulently.

The Plaintiff thus sought the following reliefs:

(a) An injunction restoring her to possession of the Apartment and thereafter restraining further breaches of her right to reside in the Apartment.

(b) Special damages, which included the expenses of finding alternative accommodation in a hotel.

(c) Aggravated damages,54 arising in part from the injury to the Plaintiff’s dignity and feelings, as well as the fear she had been put through. In particular, she took issue with the manner in which she was evicted from the Apartment:

(i) No reasonable notice was given to her prior to the eviction.

(ii) The eviction was effected at the end of the first day of trial in the PPO Proceedings (see [12] above), with the result that the Plaintiff was unable to attend trial the next day.

(iii) The eviction took place when there were still restrictions during the COVID season, during which looking for alternative accommodation was difficult.

(iv) The security guard engaged by the Company was recording the entire incident on the evening of the eviction.

(v) The Plaintiff’s belongings had been packed haphazardly in boxes and left outside the Apartment, making it difficult for her to identify if all her belongings had been properly packed.

The Plaintiff also sought various remedies premised on the tort of conversion, in relation to those of her belongings that were unaccounted for immediately following the eviction. However, the Plaintiff withdrew her claim for these remedies during the trial, after the Defendants arranged for the Plaintiff to collect the remainder of her belongings.

Defendants’ case

The Defendants alleged that the eviction on 25 August 2021 was fully justified by the Plaintiff’s unreasonable conduct.

It was the Defendants’ case that the Plaintiff’s behaviour stemmed from the decision by KTB and D2 to bequeath all their properties to Sunil. D2 contended that the Plaintiff had surreptitiously filed the Deputyship Application and the LPA Challenge to wrest control of KTB’s property. D2 also claimed that the Plaintiff grew “increasingly unpredictable and aggressive” after commencing the Deputyship Application and the LPA Challenge, both of which D2 opposed. The Plaintiff’s behaviour included the following:

(a) yelling at D2 and reducing her to tears;

(b) getting D2 to sign documents to support the Plaintiff’s litigation, without telling D2 what these documents were;

(c) taking videos of KTB as he went about his daily activities in the Apartment, as well as of conversations between D2 and Sunil;

(d) intimidating the helpers to the point that one of them lodged a complaint with the Ministry of Manpower;

(e) breaking open the Apartment’s letterbox and changing its lock; and

(f) allowing Karan to enter the Apartment during the COVID period despite him having just touched down from overseas, in disregard of quarantine requirements and thereby putting the health of both D2 and KTB (who were in the vulnerable age group) at risk.

D2 maintained that she was the legal occupier of the Apartment, as evidenced by the tenancy agreements (referred to at [8] above) which she signed with the Company, and thus had the right to ask the Plaintiff to leave the Apartment.

The Defendants rejected the Plaintiff’s claim that she was allowed to stay in the Apartment indefinitely, by virtue of the Arrangement / Understanding. Their case was that KTB and D2 allowed their daughter to live with them out of goodwill and kindness as she had just separated from her husband. They denied the existence of the Arrangement / Understanding, maintaining that the Plaintiff had no basis to expect that she could lodge herself under her parents’ roof indefinitely. The Defendants further contended that even if the Arrangement / Understanding existed, there was no basis for the Plaintiff to claim that she had acted on it to her detriment such that an estoppel could be said to have arisen in her favour. Similarly, the Defendants rejected the Plaintiff’s claim that she had a contractual licence to stay in the Apartment. As for the Plaintiff’s purported reliance on a bare licence, the Defendants contended that this was never alluded to in the Plaintiff’s pleadings and she should consequently not be allowed to raise it at trial.

The Defendants also rebuffed the Plaintiff’s claim to beneficial ownership of 80,000 shares in the Company. They maintained that the Plaintiff had always been a mere nominee shareholder, with beneficial ownership in the shares residing with KTB all along.

As regards the events leading to the eviction, D2’s pleaded defence stated that prior to the eviction, she had (a) orally asked the Plaintiff to vacate the Apartment; and (b) sent written letters through her lawyers, on 26 March and 6 August 2021, asking the Plaintiff to vacate. However, these notices to vacate were ignored by the Plaintiff.

Finally, the Defendants denied that they acted in concert with Sunil to remove the Plaintiff from the Apartment.

Significant procedural developments at trial

It is fair to say that this trial had more than its fair share of procedural twists and turns. The following is a list of the developments which ultimately came to have a profound bearing on the trial’s substantive outcome.

(a) The Plaintiff made a series of highly material concessions while under cross-examination by D2’s lawyer, Mr Daniel, on 1 February 2024. She then sought to recant these concessions the very next day, under highly contentious circumstances.

(b) The Plaintiff had initially scheduled only two witnesses to testify on her behalf: the Plaintiff and her son Karan. However, after both had completed their respective testimonies, the Plaintiff’s lawyer, Mr Premaratne, sought confirmation as to whether the Defendants would be making a submission of no case to answer. When the Defendants’ lawyers refused to commit to whether they were going to do so, the Plaintiff decided against closing her case and instead issued a subpoena for D2 to attend as a witness for the Plaintiff. Initially, Mr Daniel had strenuously resisted the subpoena. However, he eventually capitulated and offered D2 to the Plaintiff as a witness.

(c) After D2 had given oral testimony, the Plaintiff closed her case. The Defendants then proceeded to make a submission of no case to answer.

It is necessary to set these procedural developments out in some detail, as they formed a critical part of the backdrop against which the findings on substantive issues were arrived at.

Material concessions by the Plaintiff and her subsequent recantation of these concessions

On 1 February 2024 (the third day of trial), the Plaintiff was cross-examined by D2’s lawyer, Mr Daniel. Over the course of that day’s cross-examination, the Plaintiff made a series of highly material concessions – it is fair to say that these caused significant damage to her case. That very evening, after the end of the hearing, the Plaintiff met with her lawyer, Mr Premaratne. The next morning (ie, 2 February 2024), when cross-examination by Mr Daniel resumed, the Plaintiff recanted all the concessions she had made the day before.

The following paragraphs set out the concessions made by the Plaintiff, as well as the controversial circumstances under which they were recanted.

Concessions impacting on the Plaintiff’s claim to having a right to stay in the Apartment

The first set of concessions by the Plaintiff during her cross-examination on 1 February 2024 impacted on her claim that she had a right to stay in the Apartment. To recapitulate, the Plaintiff asserted that she had (among other rights):

(a) an equitable interest in the Apartment, stemming from the Arrangement / Understanding that the Plaintiff had relied on to her detriment and which gave rise to a proprietary estoppel; and

(b) a contractual licence to stay in the Apartment.

As regards the Plaintiff’s equitable claim, sub-paragraphs 10(b), 10(c), 11(b) and 11(c) of the SoC encapsulated her claim as to how a proprietary estoppel arose. These sub-paragraphs, reproduced below for ease of reference, listed various acts which the Plaintiff claimed to have performed to her detriment, in reliance on the Arrangement / Understanding:

Paragraph 12 of the SoC stated that in the alternative, a license coupled with an equity had arisen:

As regards the Plaintiff’s contractual claim, this was housed in paragraph 13 of the SoC, which stated that the acts of detriment in paragraphs 10(c) and 11(b) of the SoC, as extracted above, also constituted consideration which supported an irrevocable contractual licence:

I begin with the Plaintiff’s concessions that impacted on her equitable claim. During cross-examination, the Plaintiff declared that she had taken care of her parents and tended to the household affairs out of love. Mr Daniel had then challenged this declaration of filial piety, pointing out that paragraph 11 of the SoC stated that the Plaintiff’s actions were undertaken in reliance on a representation made to her, with no mention of love and affection in the relevant sections of her pleadings. This spawned a series of responses from the Plaintiff in which she insisted that her acts were performed out of love and nothing else. In doing so, the Plaintiff effectively conceded that the alleged acts of detriment were not performed in reliance on any representation made:

The Plaintiff also confirmed that her actions were performed regardless of any promise that her parents may have made to her and that she was not relying on what they had told her:

The Plaintiff explained that the relevant paragraphs of the SoC failed to reflect her position as it was her lawyer who had phrased her pleadings in a manner that couched her acts of love as acts of reliance instead. She went along with the phraseology as she thought that this manner of drafting was dictated by law. In truth, however, she felt “so uncomfortable” when reading her own pleadings, to the point that she had remarked to herself: “I don’t like this”. This line of cross-examination then culminated with the Plaintiff disavowing those paragraphs of the SoC setting out her equitable claim:

Next, the Plaintiff made significant concessions impacting on her claim to there being a contractual licence for her to stay in the Apartment. During cross-examination on this claim, she reiterated that her acts were performed out of love and affection and not pursuant to a commercial bargain:

The Plaintiff was then referred to paragraph 13 of the SoC, in which she stated that the acts of detriment which she had pleaded in support of her estoppel claim also constituted consideration for the contractual licence. Upon having her attention drawn to this paragraph, the Plaintiff emphatically disavowed its contents:

Concessions impacting on the conspiracy claim

The next set of concessions made by the Plaintiff during the cross-examination on 1 February 2024 impacted on her claim for the tort of conspiracy. For ease of reference, I set out the salient paragraphs of the SoC on this claim:

As can be seen from the extract, the Plaintiff’s pleaded case accused various parties of conspiring with Sunil – these included D2, Cindy and the Company.

During cross-examination on 1 February 2024, the Plaintiff made a series of concessions in which she specifically sought to absolve D2 from involvement in the conspiracy. In particular, the Plaintiff conceded that she had no basis for the allegation in paragraph 47(a) of the SoC that D2 intended to punish the Plaintiff by inflicting maximum harm and embarrassment:

Consequent to this, the Plaintiff withdrew the allegation in paragraph 47(b) of the SoC that D2’s actions were unlawful, fraudulent and dishonest:

The Plaintiff also resiled from the allegation in paragraph 48 of the SoC that D2 had engaged in conspiracy by unlawful means:

The cross-examination then touched on paragraph 49 of the SoC, which alleged that D2 had a predominant intention to damage and injure her, and which thus encapsulated the Plaintiff’s claim for conspiracy by lawful means. The Plaintiff similarly withdrew this claim as against D2:

Withdrawal of the claim for injunctive relief

The string of concessions above culminated in the Plaintiff withdrawing her claim for an injunction restoring her to possession of the Apartment. The relevant section of her cross-examination on 1 February 2024 is set out below:

Plaintiff’s recantation of her concessions

At the end of the hearing on 1 February 2024, Mr Premaratne sought permission to speak with his client about a letter from D2’s lawyers, notwithstanding that the Plaintiff was still in the middle of cross-examination. By way of backdrop, the Plaintiff’s lawyers had sent an open letter to D2’s lawyers, offering to withdraw the present suit, subject to D2 agreeing to a one-on-one meeting with the Plaintiff. D2’s lawyers had responded with a letter seeking clarification on the terms of the proposed resolution, as well as requesting that the Plaintiff respond by 2pm on 1 February 2024. Presumably, given that the correspondence pertained to attempts at resolution, the string of concessions made by the Plaintiff under cross-examination that day would have a material bearing on those attempts. Mr Daniel thus indicated that he had no objections with Mr Premaratne speaking to the Plaintiff about the letters. Mr Premaratne thus met with the Plaintiff in his office later that evening.

The next morning (ie, 2 February 2024), parties indicated that they had failed to reach any resolution pursuant to the exchange of letters. This meant that Mr Daniel would resume his cross-examination of the Plaintiff. However, before that happened, Mr Premaratne stood up and asked that the Plaintiff step out of the courtroom so that he could make an application. After the Plaintiff had taken her leave, Mr Premaratne informed the court that he harboured reservations about how the Plaintiff had given her concessions during cross-examination the day before. Specifically, Mr Premaratne was concerned that the Plaintiff may not have been aware of the “legal implications” of those concessions and he thus asked for an opportunity to speak to her, with a view to advising her about those implications. This struck me as a most irregular request. It is of course entirely within an advocate’s remit to raise objections during cross-examination. However, counsel cannot have a private caucus with their client in the middle of the latter’s cross-examination, to offer advice about the client’s responses on the stand – that would plainly adulterate the crucible in which the client’s testimony is being tested. To my mind, Mr Premaratne’s concerns about the Plaintiff not having understood the “legal implications” of her concessions were misguided. As can be seen from the extracts above, the Plaintiff’s concessions were made in response to questions by Mr Daniel that were factual in focus. That the Plaintiff’s answers may have carried legal implications (as responses in cross-examination very often would) could not in any way justify her lawyer intervening midstream through cross-examination and advising her about the implications of what she was saying. I thus disallowed Mr Premaratne’s request to speak to his client.

That should have been the end of the matter – or so one would have thought. After Mr Premaratne’s request to speak to the Plaintiff was turned down, she was called back into the courtroom for the resumption of cross-examination. It was at this point when the proceedings took a highly unexpected turn. Before Mr Daniel could commence with his questions, the Plaintiff informed him that she was withdrawing all the concessions which she made the day before. In doing so, the Plaintiff explained that when she made those concessions, her “mental state was not there” and she could not understand as she had too many things going on in her mind. I set out below the exchange in which she expressed her desire to recant the concessions:

This prompted Mr Daniel to ask the Plaintiff if she had discussed the evidence which she had given under cross-examination the day before with anyone. The Plaintiff replied that she had not. When asked if she discussed the evidence with her son Karan (who was due to take the stand as her next witness), she said that she did not. Mr Daniel then asked the Plaintiff if she had discussed the evidence with her lawyer. To this, the Plaintiff replied that she had merely discussed the “options” with Mr Premaratne. This included asking Mr Premaratne to explain her claims as well as the “options” attendant upon withdrawal of those claims. The Plaintiff recounted that from her discussion with Mr Premaratne, she concluded that “it doesn’t sound right to me”. I set out the relevant extracts from the Plaintiff’s response:

Mr Daniel then sought to reconfirm if the Plaintiff was resiling from the concessions that she had made under the previous day’s cross-examination. She reiterated that she was:

Mr Daniel then asked to address the court in the Plaintiff’s absence. After the Plaintiff stepped out of the courtroom, Mr Daniel demanded an explanation from Mr Premaratne as to what the latter had said to the Plaintiff on the previous evening to trigger the about-face in her evidence. Mr Premaratne replied that he was happy to explain, saying that when he met the Plaintiff, he merely told her about the two “options” – either withdraw her claims (which could then pave the way for the Plaintiff to meet with D2 face-to-face) or proceed with the claims. Mr Premaratne also explained that he informed the Plaintiff about these options in the presence of her son, Karan, and both mother and son had then made their decision. Mr Premaratne was not able to go into further specifics, given the boundaries of legal professional privilege. However, he confirmed that he did not speak to the Plaintiff about the implications of her answers given under cross-examination on the day before.

The Plaintiff was then called back into the courtroom, upon which cross-examination resumed. Mr Daniel continued to press her about why she recanted the concessions made the day before. The Plaintiff replied that she had gotten very emotional and had thus completely agreed with what Mr Daniel had put to her while she was on the stand. Thereafter, she had sought advice from Mr Premaratne:

It was thus clear from the answer above that, contrary to the position which Mr Premaratne had just conveyed to the court (at [56] above), the Plaintiff was affirming that she did speak to him about the implications of her concessions. The Plaintiff’s position, as encapsulated in her answer extracted immediately above, could be summed up as follows:

(a) She agreed with everything that Mr Daniel suggested under cross-examination, as she was “quite confused” and “emotional”.

(b) As such, during her meeting with Mr Premaratne that evening, she had asked him to help her understand what it was that she had agreed to, as well as the implications thereof.

(c) Mr Premaratne had clarified with her as he knew that she was completely lost.

To ensure that the record was free of ambiguity, I asked the Plaintiff to reconfirm if she had indeed spoken with her lawyer about the implications of the concessions she had made in cross-examination the day before (as opposed to simply discussing the “options” of either withdrawing or proceeding with her claims). She confirmed unequivocally that she did discuss with Mr Premaratne about the implications of her concessions in cross-examination:

Mr Premaratne subsequently filed an affidavit explaining what transpired when he spoke to the Plaintiff, during the meeting with her and Karan on the evening of 1 February 2024. However, the affidavit was bereft of details, as the Plaintiff had elected not to waive privilege over what had been discussed on the evening of 1 February 2024. The main body of the affidavit stretched for less than three pages, recounting in skeletal fashion the two options which Mr Premaratne told the court (on 2 February 2024) that he had advised the Plaintiff about – ie, to either withdraw the claims in exchange for a chance to speak to D2 face-to-face, or proceed with the claims (see [56] above). The affidavit thus provided no insight into what prompted the Plaintiff to recant the concessions made during cross-examination.

Plaintiff’s decision to call D2 as a plaintiff witness

In the ordinary course of things, a plaintiff would close his case after all his scheduled witnesses have testified. In the present trial, only two witnesses were originally slated to testify on the Plaintiff’s behalf – the Plaintiff herself and Karan. After both had given their evidence, Mr Premaratne did not close his case but instead asked the Defendants’ lawyers for an indication as to whether they were making a submission of no case to answer. If they were going to make such a submission, it would mean that D2 would not be taking the stand: see Ho Yew Kong v Sakae Holdings Ltd and other appeals and other matters [2018] 2 SLR 333, where the Court of Appeal observed (at [70]):

Mr Premaratne foreshadowed that in such an eventuality, the Plaintiff was going to issue a subpoena for D2 to testify as a witness.

The Defendants’ lawyers refused to intimate if they would be making a submission of no case to answer, insisting that the Plaintiff first close her case before they indicate what they were minded to do. The Plaintiff consequently declined to close her case and instead proceeded to issue a subpoena to call D2 as a witness for the Plaintiff. This rather unconventional manoeuvre had then triggered a series of procedural scuffles. It is necessary at this juncture for me to set them out in some detail, as well as explain how I resolved them, to better frame the context against which D2 eventually came to give her oral testimony.

D2’s attempt to set aside the subpoena served on her by the Plaintiff

After the Plaintiff issued a subpoena against D2, D2 responded by filing a summons to have it set aside.

Mr Daniel’s first ground of objection to the subpoena pertained to D2’s fitness to give evidence. He tendered an affidavit by D2 enclosing a medical report prepared by one Dr Lim Yun Chin (“Dr Lim”) from Raffles Hospital. Dr Lim had examined D2 on 26 January 2024 and concluded that she suffered from cognitive impairment. Dr Lim’s report contained the following findings:

The report then alluded to D2’s history of falls and concluded as follows:

Despite alluding to D2’s cognitive decline, Dr Lim’s report did not explicitly conclude that D2 was unable to understand or respond to questions posed to her in the witness box. Furthermore, D2 did not call Dr Lim to testify and be subjected to cross-examination by the Plaintiff. I was thus not persuaded that the subpoena against D2 should be set aside on account of Dr Lim’s report.

Another objection raised by Mr Daniel to the subpoena was that allowing D2 to be called to the stand would circumvent the no case to answer regime. He argued that the Plaintiff was effectively seeking to adduce D2’s evidence “through the backdoor”, thereby depriving D2 of her right to remain silent. Mr Daniel argued that it would be “oppressive” to compel D2 to give evidence and thereby deprive her of this right.

I rejected Mr Daniel’s objection. Firstly, he was unable to point to any authorities showing that a defendant’s right to make a submission of no case to answer is preponderant to the extent of depriving a plaintiff of the right to call a witness whose testimony is central to the issues at hand. Rather, the authorities show that there is no general prohibition at law against a party calling the opposing party as a witness: see, eg, Sakae Holdings Ltd v Gryphon Real Estate Investment Corp and others (Foo Peow Yong Douglas, third party) and another suit [2017] SGHC 100 (“Sakae Holdings”); see also M Ratnavale v S Lourdenadin and M Mahadevan v S Lourdenadin [1988] 2 MLJ 371 (“M Ratnavale”) for the Malaysian position. An example of an instance where a plaintiff was allowed to call the defendant is Pac Asian Services Pte Ltd v The Nanyang Insurance Company Limited [1993] SGHC 263.

I also took the view that Mr Daniel’s submission, to the effect that it would be “oppressive” to deprive D2 of her right to remain silent, was somewhat overstated. A plaintiff calling the defendant as a witness would likely face great difficulty in steering the latter towards those answers which the plaintiff needs to elicit, given that s 144(1) of the Evidence Act 1893 (2020 Rev Ed) (“Evidence Act”) prohibits a party from posing leading questions to his witness in the face of objections. There is nothing to suggest, nor did any of the parties before me suggest, that this prohibition is automatically lifted just because the witness being called also happens to be the opposing party. There is of course the avenue of applying under s 156 of the Evidence Act to cross-examine one’s own witness, but that is not without challenges. In CIMB Bank Bhd v Italmatic Tyre & Retreading Equipment (Asia) Pte Ltd [2021] 4 SLR 883, Vinodh Coomaraswamy J held (at [28]) that such an application would not be permitted unless certain conditions are met:

As it turned out, when D2 eventually took to the witness stand, the Plaintiff did not venture to make an application under s 156 of the Evidence Act to cross-examine her.

It would be highly imprudent for a plaintiff contemplating whether to call a defendant as a witness to simply take it for granted that permission under s 156 of the Evidence Act will be given. In PP v BAU [2016] 5 SLR 146, Woo Bih Li J (as he then was) made it clear (at [24]) that the court had an absolute discretion whether to allow a party to cross-examine his own witness. Woo J also cautioned against the liberal exercise of that discretion:

This practical implication is that a plaintiff calling a defendant as a witness is apt to find himself staring at someone in the witness box who unrelentingly spouts testimony hurting the plaintiff’s case, while the plaintiff’s counsel (being unable to pose leading questions at will) labours under a considerable handicap in managing what comes out of the witness’ mouth. The imagery which comes across is akin to that of a boxer stepping into the ring with one arm tied behind his back, or (if the defendant is not merely a passive nominal party with no interest in the case outcome but an antagonist) some might say both arms. Thus, in Sakae Holdings, Judith Prakash JA (as she then was) remarked (at [23]) that while a plaintiff could subpoena the defendant and adduce the latter’s testimony as the plaintiff’s evidence, this would be “a highly risky strategy” [emphasis added].

Hence, rather than viewing the Plaintiff’s proposal to call D2 as her own witness as (in Mr Daniel’s words) “oppressive” to D2, I saw it more as a gamble by the Plaintiff which carried a significant risk of severe damage to the Plaintiff’s own case. This was a gamble that the Plaintiff was perfectly entitled to embark on and Mr Daniel was unable to cite any legal authorities showing otherwise. After lengthy arguments from both sides, Mr Daniel ultimately capitulated and agreed to offer D2 to the Plaintiff as her witness, withdrawing his summons to set the subpoena aside.

Plaintiff’s list of proposed questions for D2’s oral examination-in-chief

Prior to D2 being called to the stand, the Plaintiff prepared a list of questions that she proposed to pose to D2 in examination-in-chief. This was to give adequate notice to the Defendants as to the oral evidence that the Plaintiff proposed to elicit from D2, the Plaintiff not having procured an affidavit of evidence-in-chief (“AEIC”) from D2 beforehand. The Plaintiff served the list of questions on D2 and her lawyers. In conjunction with the service of the list of questions, I imposed two safeguards, set out below.

The first safeguard was prompted by the Plaintiff’s request that D2’s lawyers not discuss the list of questions with D2. Mr Daniel objected to the imposition of any such prohibition. However, I found the Plaintiff’s request to be valid and directed that Mr Daniel’s firm not speak to D2 about the list of questions, once it had been served on her. In doing so, I took the view that while these questions were to be posed in what was technically “examination-in-chief”, they were in substance questions posed by an adverse party seeking to use the answers to those questions to advance his position at trial, at the expense of the witness’ case. On this narrow set of facts, I felt that the same approach as that adopted in cross-examination should apply – the party should not be consorting with her lawyers once the questioning has commenced, prior to completion of her oral testimony.

The second safeguard imposed by me served to curtail the prospect of Sunil influencing D2, as regards her answers to the Plaintiff’s list of questions. Although the Plaintiff had no objections to serving her list of questions on D2 personally, the Plaintiff was concerned that D2 might (upon being served with the questions) be coached by Sunil, with Cindy acting as “the conduit between the son [ie, Sunil] and the mother [ie, D2]”. In this respect, it was the Plaintiff’s position that Sunil had been putting his words into D2’s affidavits, as well as in the lawyer’s letters purportedly sent on D2’s behalf. However, the defence contended that seeing as how D2 was already being blocked from access to her lawyers (as per the first safeguard, detailed in the preceding paragraph), it would be “extremely cruel” to further isolate D2 by cutting her off from Cindy, who was D2’s personal assistant. This was in light of the fact that D2 was 90 years of age, suffered from weakened eyesight and laboured from cognitive impairment (see [63] above), and was consequently heavily dependent on Cindy when it came to reading and understanding legal documents. Given the litany of age-related mental and physical frailties suffered by D2, there was thus a fear that her testimony might be substantively compromised if she was cut off from all familiar lines of support. To balance the concerns from both sides, I allowed Cindy (in her capacity as D2’s personal assistant) to explain the Plaintiff’s list of questions to D2 but directed that she was not to act as Sunil’s conduit in doing so. Cindy ultimately did not testify, so there was no issue of D2 and Cindy tailoring their respective testimonies to create a veneer of coherence.

I should highlight at this juncture that upon the close of trial, the Plaintiff alleged that the second safeguard detailed above had been breached, by way of Cindy serving as a conduit for Sunil when explaining the Plaintiff’s list of questions to D2. However, this turned out to be an entirely bald allegation, with no evidence in support. When D2 was on the stand, she was specifically queried by Mr Premaratne about the process by which Cindy explained the list of questions to her. Mr Premaratne failed to elicit any responses to suggest that D2’s answers might have been tainted in any way by Sunil’s involvement, whether directly or through Cindy. D2 even explained that she refrained from speaking to Cindy for five to six days prior to testifying. I thus found the Plaintiff’s suggestion that Sunil had (through Cindy) somehow coached D2 in her responses to the Plaintiff’s list of questions to be without merit.

Plaintiff’s objection to the admission of D2’s AEIC into evidence

While the Plaintiff was keen to admit D2’s evidence by way of oral examination-in-chief, she strenuously objected to allowing the written evidence in D2’s AEIC to be admitted into evidence. I dismissed her objection.

When a defendant makes a submission of no case to answer, this means that the defence witnesses will not be giving any evidence and would thus not be subjected to cross-examination by the plaintiff. Ordinarily, this would result in the defence witnesses’ AEICs being inadmissible in evidence, by virtue of the prohibition in O 38 r 2(1) of the Rules of Court 2014, which states:

However, given that the Plaintiff took the unconventional step of calling D2 as a witness for the Plaintiff, this meant that D2’s lawyers would now get to question her, not by way of examination-in-chief, but by way of cross-examination. It is not unusual for cross-examining advocates to refer the witness to the latter’s out-of-court statement and seek confirmation from the witness that the statement was indeed made by her. This typically serves as a prelude to the cross-examining advocate questioning the witness about the statement and thereafter applying for the statement to be admitted into evidence. However, when the defence sought to admit D2’s AEIC during her cross-examination, the Plaintiff objected, highlighting concerns that D2’s AEIC was 768 pages long (inclusive of exhibits) and arguing that the defence could not simply admit the entire document just like that.

I saw no reason to disallow the admission of D2’s AEIC into evidence. The Plaintiff was unable to offer any legal basis for saying that D2’s AEIC should be treated differently from any other out-of-court statement made by a witness and which is sought to be adduced during that witness’ cross-examination. More importantly, I saw no material prejudice that the Plaintiff might suffer from D2’s AEIC being admitted into evidence. If the Plaintiff had concerns with any part of the AEIC’s contents, her lawyer always had the option of seeking clarifications or qualifications from D2 in re-examination. I consequently allowed the defence’s application to admit D2’s AEIC into evidence.

I observed that the Plaintiff’s objection to the admission of D2’s AEIC into evidence was entirely consistent with the Plaintiff’s theory (at [73] above) that Sunil was putting his words into D2’s affidavits. However, I was unconvinced by this as the Plaintiff was unable to offer any explanation as to how Sunil might have substituted his words into D2’s AEIC when D2’s lawyers were involved in the preparation process. The Plaintiff stopped short of explicitly accusing Mr Daniel’s firm of being in cahoots with Sunil. In any case, the Plaintiff’s theory that Sunil had been using D2’s sworn evidence as his mouthpiece was put to rest when D2 eventually took to the witness stand. As explained below, D2 had given oral testimony which heavily undermined the Plaintiff’s case, despite extensive quizzing by the Plaintiff’s own lawyer and without Sunil anywhere in sight to pull the puppet strings.

Prior to the admission of the AEIC, D2 had confirmed its veracity by testifying as to what would happen before she signed any affidavit: the document would be read to D2 by her lawyer and she would sign the same only if it was correct. D2 further confirmed that the signature on the AEIC was hers. However, the Plaintiff was still dissatisfied and, after the close of trial, persisted in her contention that D2’s AEIC should not have been admitted into evidence. In her closing submissions, the Plaintiff argued that the AEIC should be excluded because Ms Ganga (ie, Mr Daniel’s second chair, who was tasked by Mr Daniel to cross-examine D2) had, as a prelude to applying for the AEIC’s admission, posed highly leading questions to D2 when ascertaining the AEIC’s veracity. In particular, the Plaintiff took issue with the leading nature of the following line of questioning by Ms Ganga:

I found the Plaintiff’s complaint to be without merit. Before explaining, it is necessary to set out the background to the Plaintiff’s grievance on this point. Given that D2 was in effect going to be “cross-examined” by a friendly party (ie, her own lawyer), I had prompted Mr Premaratne to confirm if his client was relying on any legislative provision, in respect of the manner in which D2’s cross-examination was to be conducted. After taking some time to look into this, Mr Premaratne reverted that the Plaintiff was seeking to invoke s 145(2) of the Evidence Act, which gives the court the discretion to prohibit leading questions, even in cross-examination, if they are being put to a witness whose interests are aligned with the cross-examining party. While I took the view that some leading questions could be permitted on non-critical matters, I agreed with the Plaintiff that Ms Ganga should not have an unbridled hand in posing leading questions to D2, particularly if these pertained to critical facts in issue. I had thus cautioned both Mr Daniel and Ms Ganga to abide by this when cross-examining D2, failing which the Plaintiff’s lawyer might object:

It was thus made very clear that the Plaintiff could object if Ms Ganga’s leading questions strayed into any area which she was not prepared for D2 to be led on. Yet, no objections were raised to the questions posed by Ms Ganga when she was eliciting D2’s confirmation as to the veracity of the latter’s affidavit. I was thus not prepared to entertain objections if they were being raised only in closing submissions.

Defendants’ submission of no case to answer

After D2 had completed giving her oral testimony, the Plaintiff closed her case. The Defendants responded by making a submission of no case to answer and, in doing so, undertook not to call any evidence.

The trial then closed.

My Decision

As with any other civil matter, the Plaintiff bore the legal burden of proving her case on a balance of probabilities. However, given the absence of any evidence called by the Defendants, this meant that evidentially, the Plaintiff needed to prove each element of her claims to only a prima facie standard, notwithstanding that legally, the standard of proof applicable to the assessment of her case was the balance of probabilities. The prima facie standard was determinative here because once the Plaintiff’s evidence crossed the prima facie threshold, the absence of any countervailing evidence from the Defendants meant that her prima facie evidence could be regarded as having effectively proved her claims on a balance of probabilities. In metaphorical terms, given the absence of any evidence from the Defendants to serve as a counterweight, the Plaintiff’s prima facie evidence would carry enough heft to tip the scales past the “balance of probabilities” gradation.

As the Court of Appeal observed in Ma Hongjin v SCP Holdings Pte Ltd [2021] 1 SLR 304 (“Ma Hongjin”) (at [32]–[33]):

Thus, in assessing the Plaintiff’s case, I focused on whether she had adduced prima facie evidence to support each element of her claims.

The approach to assessing if a plaintiff has succeeded in establishing a prima facie case was canvassed in the High Court decision of Relfo Ltd (in liquidation) v Bhimji Velji Jadva Varsani [2008] 4 SLR(R) 657 (“Relfo”), which was in turn cited with approval by the Court of Appeal in Lena Leowardi v Yeap Cheen Soo [2015] 1 SLR 581 (at [24]). In Relfo, Judith Prakash J (as she then was) explained (at [20]):

A plaintiff would thus fail to establish a prima facie case if his evidence is deficient in either of the following respects:

(a) Legally, the plaintiff’s evidence fails to establish a case in law.

(b) Factually, the plaintiff’s evidence is so unsatisfactory or unreliable that the burden of proof cannot be regarded as having been discharged.

As regards the factual dimension of a plaintiff’s case, a court faced with a submission of no case to answer begins by assuming that the plaintiff’s evidence is true. However, the court may depart from this starting position and conclude that a plaintiff has failed to establish a prima facie case if the latter’s evidence fails to cross certain minimum standards of reliability. In Relfo, Prakash J endorsed the view expressed in Halsbury’s Laws of Singapore vol 10 (Butterworths Asia, 2006 Reissue) that a prima facie case may not be made out if the plaintiff’s evidence is “manifestly unreliable” (at [20]):

Similarly, in Millsopp, Michael Joseph v Then Feng [2022] SGHC(A) 27, the Appellate Division of the High Court held (at [12]):

For the reasons set out below, I took the view that from a factual perspective, the Plaintiff’s evidence was (to use the language quoted in Relfo) “so unsatisfactory or unreliable that [her] burden of proof had not been discharged”. So far as the Plaintiff’s personal testimony was concerned, I found it to be wanting in both particularity and credibility. Taking a step back and viewing the entire corpus of evidence advanced on the Plaintiff’s behalf, I found her case to be internally inconsistent on many material fronts. In this respect, I took the view that what constituted the “Plaintiff’s evidence” comprised not only the testimonies of the Plaintiff and her son Karan, but the evidence of D2 as well. This was because the Plaintiff had called D2 as a witness for the Plaintiff. Indeed, in M Ratnavale, the court remarked that “when the defendant is called as a plaintiff`s witness, his evidence is to be treated as the evidence of the plaintiff”. Once D2’s evidence was baked into the mix and the Plaintiff’s evidence scrutinised holistically, the cracks at the seams of the Plaintiff’s case were highly visible.

The Plaintiff contended that just because she had called D2 as her own witness did not mean that D2’s evidence, including that in D2’s AEIC, should be accepted as the Plaintiff’s evidence in toto. I accepted this, to the extent that the Plaintiff was at liberty to qualify D2’s testimony, whether by seeking clarifications from her while she was on the stand or even making an application to cross-examine D2 on specific points. However, as explained below, this was not done at various significant junctures in D2’s examination-in-chief and re-examination. Consequently, upon the close of D2’s oral testimony, much of what she said that undermined the Plaintiff’s case remained unqualified.

Before elaborating on my findings, it is useful to recapitulate the Plaintiff’s substantive claims, for ease of reference:

(a) Firstly, the Plaintiff claimed that her eviction on 25 August 2021 was wrongful as it breached her right to occupy the Apartment. According to her, that right stemmed from the following causes of action:

(i) The Plaintiff had an irrevocable equitable interest in the Apartment, conferred by way of a proprietary estoppel or a license coupled with an equity, which allowed her to reside in the Apartment for life without paying rent. An equity arose in her favour because she had, in reliance on a representation made to her, performed various acts to her detriment.

(ii) She also had an irrevocable contractual license to remain in the Apartment, wherein consideration for the underlying contract comprised the same acts of reliance which she claimed to have performed to her detriment in (i) above.

(iii) Additionally, she had a bare license to remain in the Apartment and this had not been terminated by sufficient notice (the claim to a bare licence was not pleaded).

(iv) She beneficially owned 80,000 shares in the Company, and that somehow conferred upon her an interest in the Apartment, which was owned by the Company.

(b) Secondly, the Plaintiff claimed that all three Defendants conspired to injure her, by both lawful and unlawful means. Specifically, the Plaintiff claimed that there was an agreement between the Defendants and Sunil to punish her by inflicting maximum harm and embarrassment, thereby conferring an unfair advantage on Sunil in the ongoing legal proceedings.

(c) Thirdly, the Plaintiff claimed that D2 and Cindy dishonestly assisted the Company to commit an unlawful act, being the eviction of the Plaintiff, by improperly passing the Board Resolutions in breach of their duties as directors of the Company.

My findings in respect of each of these claims are set out below.

Equitable right to occupy: Proprietary estoppel

It was a struggle trying to make sense of the Plaintiff’s pleadings on her equitable claim.

For a start, it was unclear as to exactly what the Plaintiff was claiming to have relied upon, to her detriment, which gave rise to the estoppel:

(a) The SoC stated that after the Plaintiff and her parents moved to the Apartment in 2010, the Arrangement / Understanding came into being. The SoC then stated that the Plaintiff had, in reliance on the Arrangement / Understanding, engaged in various acts to her detriment, including tending to her parents’ welfare and dealing with the Apartment’s renovation, rectification and furnishings.

(b) The SoC then stated that further and/or in the alternative, the Company was estopped from denying her of a right to stay in the Apartment because there was “an express representation and/or promise and/or conduct” by KTB which the Plaintiff had acted on. Presumably, the Plaintiff’s case was that the “conduct” here was tantamount to an implied representation which she relied upon.

I could not tell from the SoC just how the Arrangement / Understanding in (a) differed from the express/implied representation in (b), such that they were advanced as alternative bases for the Plaintiff’s estoppel claim. After all, both were put forward by the SoC as being the object of the Plaintiff’s reliance. The difficulty in distinguishing between the two items was exacerbated by the fact that the Plaintiff’s pleadings, constituted by the SoC and her Further and Better Particulars (“F&BP”) (Amendment No. 1), offered extremely scant details about both items. As will be explained in these grounds, the Plaintiff’s evidence at trial also failed to pin down, with any meaningful degree of particularity, the terms of the Arrangement / Understanding and the occasion on which the representation was made.

The only sensible interpretation of the SoC which I could arrive at was that both the Arrangement / Understanding and the representation were two sides of the same coin. The Arrangement / Understanding could not have simply arisen in a vacuum – it would have to be spawned by a representation, whether express (eg, by way of a promise) or implied (by way of conduct). The Plaintiff’s pleadings could thus be interpreted to say that there was an express or implied representation about the Arrangement / Understanding, which the Plaintiff had relied on to her detriment.

The next paragraph of the SoC then alluded to a licence coupled with an equity, advancing this as another alternative claim:

Again, the Plaintiff did not explain why the licence coupled with an equity was pleaded as an “alternative” claim to the estoppel (referred to in the immediately preceding paragraphs of the SoC) when it was more in the nature of a remedy sought to be imposed as a result of the estoppel. There was also no elaboration in the Plaintiff’s closing submissions, which simply stated that the Plaintiff’s claim in equity was “founded in proprietary estoppel / license coupled with equity”. The Plaintiff had thus joined both terms at the hip, without explaining the interrelationship between them.

I read the Plaintiff’s SoC to mean that she was advancing the proprietary estoppel as an equitable cause of action, and that she was pursuing a licence coupled with an equity as a remedy to satisfy the equity arising in her favour under the estoppel. The nature of such a licence, and how it might flow from an estoppel, was explained by the learned authors of Tang Hang Wu & Kelvin F K Low, Tan Sook Yee’s Principles of Singapore Land Law (LexisNexis, 4th Ed, 2019) (“Tan Sook Yee”) at p 655:

Having attempted to make sense of the Plaintiff’s pleadings, I delved into her claim that a proprietary estoppel had arisen.

To establish a proprietary estoppel, a plaintiff must establish the following three elements:

such that it is unconscionable to allow the representor to resile from the position conveyed by the representation: Hong Leong Singapore Finance Ltd v United Overseas Bank Ltd [2007] 1 SLR(R) 292 (“Hong Leong Singapore Finance”) at [170]–[171]. Given that the Defendants elected not to adduce any evidence, the Plaintiff needed to prove the above elements to only a prima facie degree.

Whether there was a representation giving rise to an estoppel

As explained above, the Plaintiff’s claim to a proprietary estoppel hinged on a representation about the Arrangement / Understanding.

As a preliminary observation, it was the Plaintiff’s pleaded case that the representation came from KTB. She did not expressly spell out why KTB should be regarded as having the authority to make representations as to who would get to stay in the Apartment, given that the tenancy agreements signed by D2 (see [8] above) would suggest that the right should belong to D2, as the legal occupier. However, the Plaintiff submitted that the tenancy agreement was a sham, for the following reasons:

(a) While the first tenancy agreement (signed when the family moved into the Apartment in 2010) was contemporaneously stamped for stamp duty, the subsequent tenancy agreements were not. These subsequent agreements were stamped only after legal proceedings commenced.

(b) Furthermore, while D2 claimed that the rental payable by her under the tenancy agreements had been offset from sums due to her by the Company (eg, director’s fees), the Plaintiff alleged that the Company failed to clearly demonstrate this. Specifically, the Plaintiff asserted that a ledger which the Company had produced, showing how the rent had been offset from sums owing to D2, should not be believed.

(c) Finally, the Company itself had taken the position that it had the exclusive right to decide who stays in the Apartment, despite D2 being the legal tenant.

D2 countered that the tenancy agreements were genuine, thus making her the legal occupier of the Apartment.

Without expressing any view on whether the rental agreements between D2 and the Company were genuine, I saw some force in the Plaintiff’s submission that legal possession of the Apartment had somehow remained with the Company, despite the tenancy agreements with D2. If D2 was indeed the legal occupier, she could have simply thrown the Plaintiff out without going through the rigmarole of procuring the Board Resolutions (see [11] above), signed by Cindy and herself, to effect the eviction.

If the Company continued to retain legal possession of the Apartment, this meant that any representations by KTB as to who could stay in the Apartment would be binding, since all parties appeared to contemplate that he was the Company’s directing mind and will. As such, in considering if there had indeed been a representation about the Arrangement / Understanding, any words or conduct emanating from KTB would carry much weight.

A representation giving rise to an estoppel may either be express or implied. As regards implied representations, these can be implied from conduct or even silence. In Hong Leong Singapore Finance, Sundaresh Menon JC (as he then was) observed (at [194]) that:

The Plaintiff’s pleaded case was that the representation about the Arrangement / Understanding was either express or implied.

Having assessed the pleadings and the evidence, I concluded that the Plaintiff failed to establish, even at a prima facie level, that a representation (whether express or implied) about the Arrangement / Understanding had been made to her.

In seeking to establish the representation, the Plaintiff bore the burden of proving who made the representation, as well as the contents of that representation. As will be elaborated upon in these grounds, I found the Plaintiff’s case to be problematic on both fronts:

(a) As regards the identity of the representator, the Plaintiff testified under cross-examination that the representation was conveyed to her personally by both KTB and D2. However, this was a marked departure from the Plaintiff’s pleaded case (see [99] above) that it was KTB who made the representation.

(b) As regards the contents of the representation, the Plaintiff’s pleadings contained insufficient particulars from which one could glean a clear and unequivocal representation, whether by words or conduct, conveying the Arrangement / Understanding. In like vein, the Plaintiff’s evidence lacked credibility:

(i) Her AEIC failed to cast sufficient light on what exactly was said or done, from which an express or implied representation could be derived.

(ii) As for her oral testimony, I found this to be unreliable to the point of being unable to cross even the prima facie threshold of proof.

I begin with the Plaintiff’s claim that there was an express representation.

The relevant particulars of the alleged express representation began to emerge only during the Plaintiff’s cross-examination. As to what was conveyed, she initially explained in cross-examination that KTB told her that she was his daughter, that he would protect her and that the family’s properties were available for the family to live in, expense-free:

As a preliminary observation, even if the Plaintiff’s evidence above were accepted, KTB’s alleged words that she could stay in the Apartment “expense-free” stopped far short of the representation which she contended for, which was that her right to stay was irrevocable.

When the Plaintiff sought to elaborate on the contents of the representation, material inconsistencies as to exactly what was represented began to surface. At one juncture, the Plaintiff said that under the Arrangement / Understanding, “it is my right to stay in the property as long as my family members have wanted me to” [emphasis added]. This suggested that her stay was at her parents’ pleasure, which fell short of the representation contended for by the Plaintiff, ie, that her right to stay was irrevocable. Shortly after that, she said that “my parents … wanted for me as their daughter to live with them as long as I wished because this is the family home and this is where they would like me to spend their old age” [emphasis added], thereby suggesting (by the word “I”) that her stay was for a duration determined by her alone and not something which her family could revoke at will.

A party laying claim to a proprietary estoppel must clearly set out the subject matter to which the estoppel relates. In the House of Lords decision of Cobbe v Yeoman's Row Management Ltd & and another [2008] 1 WLR 1752, Lord Scott of Foscote observed (at [28]):

From the preceding paragraph, it was clear that the Plaintiff had failed to provide the requisite clarity, given her inability to even put up a consistent account of exactly what was represented.

To my mind, these inconsistencies were material obstacles standing in the way of the Plaintiff’s endeavour to prove a prima facie case. Even if I were to assume that “the Plaintiff’s evidence” was true (this assumption being the starting premise when assessing a submission of no case to answer – see [87] above), the application of that assumption becomes fraught with difficulties if parts of the Plaintiff’s testimony point one way and parts of it point to another. Where material, such internal inconsistencies potentially render it challenging for the court to identify with certainty just what “the plaintiff’s evidence” (which the court is to assume as correct) is.

The inconsistencies were also apparent when evaluating the corpus of the Plaintiff’s evidence as a whole which, as explained at [88] above, included D2’s evidence (given that D2 was called as a witness for the Plaintiff). Surely, those aspects of D2’s testimony which had not been qualified or challenged by the Plaintiff while D2 was being examined (or re-examined) on the stand must form part of the Plaintiff’s case. In this respect, the Plaintiff’s claims about an express representation having been made were flatly contradicted by D2, who stated unequivocally that both KTB and D2 never promised the Plaintiff an irrevocable right to stay in the Apartment:

The Plaintiff did not attempt to seek any clarification or qualifications from D2, as regards her response extracted above, during D2’s re-examination.

It is also necessary to highlight at this juncture that the Plaintiff’s evidence as to the contents of the representation suffered from two significant procedural deficiencies:

(a) The representations alleged by the Plaintiff above were never pleaded – neither in the SoC nor in the Plaintiff’s F&BP. She explained that she failed to plead the representations as she felt “embarrassed”, since family members “don’t say [these words] to each other”.

(b) Additionally, the representations alleged by the Plaintiff were not mentioned in her AEIC. She explained that her AEIC failed to capture KTB’s exact words because the words were conveyed to her through D2.

I did not accept any of these explanations. It was plain to see that the Plaintiff had held her cards close to her chest, drip feeding the particulars of her claim and fully revealing her position only in her oral testimony.

More importantly, the Plaintiff’s explanation in the preceding paragraph that it was D2 who conveyed the representation (even if it was supposedly on KTB’s behalf) simply did not cohere with her pleadings, which recounted that it was KTB who made the representation (see [99] above). No particulars had been pleaded about D2 having conveyed the same.

Given the lack of particulars in the Plaintiff’s pleadings and AEIC, as well as the material inconsistencies between the oral testimonies adduced in the Plaintiff’s case, I found her claim that there was an express representation about the Arrangement / Understanding to be so unreliable that it failed to cross the prima facie threshold.

I now move to the Plaintiff’s claim that there was an implied representation about the Arrangement / Understanding.

Under cross-examination, the Plaintiff testified that the implied representation arose from how KTB had made her feel “so secure”:

The Plaintiff’s testimony, as extracted above, was emblematic of her propensity to ramble without any concretisation of particulars. There was no attempt by her to precisely set out the terms of the Arrangement / Understanding conveyed by the implied representation. As explained at [109] above, a plaintiff’s evidence needs to be clear as regards the subject matter to which the estoppel relates. Even if KTB made her feel “so secure in every way possible”, that could not in and of itself evince an intention to confer an irrevocable right to stay.

In any event, an examination of the evidence showed that it was simply not possible to imply any representation by the Defendants that the Plaintiff had an irrevocable right to stay in the Apartment. Many of the dealings which the Plaintiff sought to rely on, in support of her claim to an implied representation that she had an irrevocable right to stay, simply did not carry the implication which she claimed them to have. The following sets out the main dealings which she relied on, as well as my views on them.

Firstly, the Plaintiff made much of the fact that KTB promised to provide for her financially. She pointed out that her parents had set up a trust fund worth US$5m for her benefit. That they intended to provide for her was also supported by the evidence of D2, who testified that the Plaintiff did not want a trust and preferred to be given cash and properties instead, and that D2 and KTB refused to accede to the Plaintiff’s preference because without a trust, “the money will go … just like that”. The Plaintiff’s parents had thus specifically decided (for the Plaintiff’s own security) to provide for her by way of a trust. D2 further confirmed that a trust in the Plaintiff’s favour was in existence as at the point of the eviction. That said, it was unclear to me what representation the Plaintiff sought to imply from this. Making financial provisions for one’s children, including the setting up of a trust fund, is very different from empowering them to irrevocably lodge themselves under one’s roof, rent free.

Secondly, the Plaintiff also relied on the evidence of Karan, who testified about an incident in 2013/2014 where Sunil allegedly perpetrated family violence against the Plaintiff. It was Karan’s evidence that following the incident, KTB told the Plaintiff that she was an integral part of the family and that KTB wanted the Plaintiff to stay with KTB and D2. This, argued the Plaintiff, reinforced the view that she had an implied right to stay at the Apartment. Again, I found this submission difficult to follow. Letting one’s child take refuge in one’s home in the wake of some hardship is very different from giving that child an irrevocable right to stay. As remarked by the English High Court in Coombes v Smith [1986] 1 WLR 808 (at 818):

Thirdly, the Plaintiff relied on her heavy involvement in the selection and purchase of the Apartment. For example, she had accompanied her parents to choose the Apartment in 2007. She alleged that when she discussed the purchase with KTB, he had told her to secure a unit that was to her liking. She said that KTB told her that the unit would be the new family home which the Plaintiff could stay in, together with KTB and D2. Thereafter, the Plaintiff had assisted with the administrative steps in completing the purchase of the Apartment. I found it difficult to see how any of this was probative of the implied representation which the Plaintiff claimed to have existed. Just because a parent involves his child in buying a home does not in any way signify that he is giving the child an irrevocable equitable interest in that home, particularly when that child provided no financial contribution to the purchase.

Finally, the Plaintiff argued that her right to stay could be implied from an affidavit which Sunil had filed in HC/S 1212/2003. As explained at [9(a)] above, this suit pertained to a property at Ardmore Park belonging to the Company, which Sunil had been staying in. The Company had sued Sunil for, among other things, the payment of rent. In an affidavit filed by Sunil in that suit, he claimed that there was an “understanding” between him and KTB, to the effect that Sunil could reside in the Ardmore Park property rent free and without any limitation as to tenure. The Plaintiff contended that Sunil’s claim to such an understanding corroborated her case that such arrangements, in which KTB’s children were allowed to stay rent-free in the Company’s residential properties, could be implied as part and parcel of the family dynamics.

I rejected this suggestion. Critically, the Company had in HC/S 1212/2003 disputed the existence of any such understanding. Since the Company was acting at KTB’s behest, its position could be imputed to KTB, thereby putting paid to the notion that Sunil’s rent-free stay at Ardmore Park was accepted practice in KTB’s eyes. The Plaintiff then tried to distinguish Sunil’s situation by saying that the Plaintiff enjoyed a “nice relationship” with KTB, while Sunil was denied the indulgence of rent-free accommodations because of his legal disputes with his father. I did not see how this was a valid distinguishing factor. The Plaintiff herself was embroiled in legal battles with KTB. As explained at [9(b)] above, KTB had commenced HC/S 186/2014 against her after she mortgaged the Parkshore Property to secure funds for Karan’s company. KTB took action against the Plaintiff on the basis that the Parkshore Property was held by her on trust for him, meaning that she could not simply mortgage the Parkshore Property to raise funds for her son’s business. The Plaintiff failed to explain why, if Sunil should be regarded as having been disqualified from rent-free accommodations by virtue of his litigation with KTB in HC/S 1212/2003, the same should not flow from her litigation with KTB in HC/S 186/2014.

Given the above, I took the view that, as with the Plaintiff’s case on the alleged express representation, her case that there was an implied representation failed to cross the prima facie threshold. In particular, I failed to see how the factors which she relied on could support the implication of a representation that she had an irrevocable right to stay.

Given the absence of either an express or implied representation, the Plaintiff’s claim to a proprietary estoppel failed. For the claim to succeed, any purported acts of detriment on her part would have had to be performed in reliance on such a representation. It would not suffice for these acts to have been performed by the Plaintiff merely in the hope that she would get an irrevocable right to stay in the Apartment, if there was never any representation to that effect: see Hong Leong Singapore Finance at [179].

Detriment which the Plaintiff claimed to have incurred in reliance on the representation

Even if there had been a representation (express or implied) about the Arrangement / Understanding, I was of the view that the evidence failed to establish (even at a prima facie level) that the Plaintiff acted in reliance on that representation to her detriment.

To recapitulate, the acts which the Plaintiff claimed to have performed to her detriment, in reliance on the representation, could be categorised as follows (see [17] above):

Additionally, the Plaintiff claimed that she had, in reliance on the representation, incurred detriment by relinquishing the right to stay in two other properties held in her name – being the Parkshore Property and the Sovereign unit -– which she would otherwise have enjoyed: see [19] above.

I examined each category of detriment alleged by the Plaintiff and found them to be without merit.

(1) Taking care of D2 and KTB

The Plaintiff claimed to have taken care of her parents’ welfare, to the point of being their primary caregiver. Specifically, she declared herself to have been the main caregiver for D2 since 2006 and for KTB since 2016. She alleged that apart from attending to household affairs, she fetched them to their medical appointments, corroborating her claim with receipts for medical treatments that were in her possession and records of WhatsApp chats where she was seen alluding to the health of KTB and D2.

I rejected the Plaintiff’s claim. Preliminarily, there was a host of countervailing indicators showing that the Plaintiff was not the main caregiver to her parents. For example, there were multiple domestic helpers living in the Apartment tending to the needs of both KTB and D2 (see [11] above). In fact, the District Judge hearing the LPA Challenge expressly found that contrary to the Plaintiff’s claims, she was not KTB’s primary caregiver. The District Judge opined that KTB was physically taken care of by the helpers in the Apartment and the fact that the Plaintiff may have issued directions to these helpers did not make her the primary caregiver. Similarly, D2’s testimony indicated that the Plaintiff’s contributions to the household were plainly unremarkable, with the latter spending her time “sitting in the house”:

More importantly, even if the Plaintiff’s acts of taking care of her parents were sufficiently significant as to constitute detriment for purposes of raising an estoppel, the evidence showed that these acts were not performed in reliance on the representation which she claimed to have been made about the Arrangement/ Understanding. To recapitulate, the Plaintiff conceded in cross-examination (see [43] above) that:

I am mindful that the Plaintiff recanted these concessions on the very next day (ie, on 2 February 2024) – see [55] above. Specifically, she did an about turn and said that the acts of detriment were not performed entirely out of love and filial piety. Instead, she re-packaged her testimony to say that her acts were motivated by a combination of both filial piety and reliance on the representation about the Arrangement / Understanding. The following sets out the relevant portion of her testimony post-recantation:

In closing submissions, the Plaintiff reiterated that her love for her parents and her reliance on the representation were not mutually exclusive. It was not a binary choice between either, meaning that it was still possible for her to have been motivated by a combination of both.

As alluded to at [53]–[58] above, the circumstances under which the concessions were made in cross-examination and their subsequent recantation were nothing short of bewildering. In my view, it was not open to me to simply discount the concessions, just because the Plaintiff attempted to recant them, given that her evidence on the circumstances surrounding the volte-face could not – by any stretch of the imagination – be regarded as credible. I took this view for the following reasons.

Firstly, the Plaintiff offered no satisfactory explanation for why she made the concessions during cross-examination on 1 February 2024, if they were indeed erroneous:

(a) The Plaintiff contended that she made the concessions as she was “emotional” (see [57] above), that her “mental state was not there”, and that she had “too many things going in [sic] [her] mind” (see [53] above). In closing submissions, the Plaintiff elaborated further, saying that she was suffering from depression, anxiety and schizophrenia and was under medication. However, the Plaintiff failed to point to anything within her medical records showing how the mental conditions at issue might bear a causal link to a patient to make false concessions on oath, which the Plaintiff claimed to have done during cross-examination on 1 February 2024.

(b) The Plaintiff also complained that the concessions had been made by her in response to cross-examination questions that were “inadequately phrased” and which focused on isolated portions of her pleadings. I was unable to agree. The questions were clear and pitched at a factual level. If they had indeed been phrased in a misleading fashion, her lawyer could have objected to them.

(c) The Plaintiff also alleged that the concessions were made because she was not afforded the opportunity to seek legal advice before making them. Again, I rejected this submission, for the same reasons that I rejected her lawyer’s request (alluded to at [52] above) to advise her in the middle of her cross-examination about the implications of her answers on the stand. It is nothing short of improper for counsel to steer their client’s testimony in such fashion, whilst cross-examination is in progress.

I would conclude on this first point by stressing that a witness is expected to answer both truthfully and carefully, when testifying on the stand. If she wants the court to countenance an about turn from what she previously said in the witness box, there must be a credible explanation for why she gave the evidence (which she now seeks to recant) in the first place, if that evidence was indeed false.

Secondly, the explanations for what prompted the Plaintiff to recant her concessions simply did not add up. As alluded to at [56] above, the Defendants’ lawyers had demanded an explanation from Mr Premaratne for his client’s sudden recantation of her concessions, following her meeting with him the evening before. The Plaintiff was then asked to step out of the courtroom, upon which Mr Premaratne assured the court that he had not spoken to the Plaintiff about the implications of her concessions. However, when the Plaintiff returned to the witness stand after that, she said the exact opposite of what Mr Premaratne had just assured the court, ie, that she did discuss with Mr Premaratne about the implications of her concessions (see [58] above). I was thus left facing a situation where the party was saying one thing and her lawyer was saying something entirely different, on what had become a highly critical point of contention. Mr Premaratne also claimed to be constrained from explaining any further, on account of the Plaintiff refusing to waive privilege as to what had transpired at the meeting with him on the evening of 1 February 2024 (see [59] above). While the Plaintiff was of course entitled to maintain that privilege, the upshot was that the record now contained a highly material discrepancy which remained unexplained and which thus cast a long pall on the reliability of her testimony. In fact, there were portions of the Plaintiff’s testimony indicating that the recantations were motivated by collateral reasons. Specifically, the Plaintiff mentioned that she wanted “the liars to come to lie” in court but the withdrawal of her claims meant that this outcome was no longer tenable. This suggested that her recantations were motivated by tactics rather than truth.

Thirdly, the Plaintiff’s behaviour in recanting her concessions inspired little confidence in her candour. As explained above, when the recantations were made, Mr Daniel had pressed the Plaintiff about whether she had spoken with anyone after the end of the previous day’s cross-examination (see [54] above). Specifically, he asked the Plaintiff if she had spoken with her son Karan (who was due to be called as her next witness) and she had said “no”. However, when the Plaintiff was asked to leave the courtroom, Mr Premaratne explained to the court that she did speak to Karan when they both met Mr Premaratne the evening before (see [56] above). When the Plaintiff was called back into the courtroom, she was asked again if she had spoken to her son the evening before. This time, she admitted that she had done so and conceded that she was not being truthful when she told the court a few moments before that she had not.

I thus rejected the Plaintiff’s attempt to recant the concessions that she had made while under cross-examination on 1 February 2024. I should add that even if recantations were accepted, her evidence post-recantation still failed to sufficiently demonstrate that her actions had been performed in reliance on the representation about the Arrangement / Understanding. As stated at [131] above, the Plaintiff had, after recanting her concessions, sought to clarify that she took care of her parents as she was motivated by a combination of both filial piety and reliance. She argued that just because she was motivated primarily by love for her parents, this did not rule out the possibility that her reliance on the representation was also a contributing impetus for her to make the sacrifices that she did. Notwithstanding, she said that filial piety comprised 99% of that combination:

The Plaintiff’s allusion to 99% was strongly indicative of her reliance on the representation (if any) being de minimis. This was reinforced by the Plaintiff’s response which followed shortly after the exchange above, in which she re-affirmed that her actions were not performed for reward:

Consequently, I rejected the Plaintiff’s claim that her actions in taking care of her parents and tending to the household matters constituted detriment that could found a proprietary estoppel. She failed to demonstrate that the extent of detriment allegedly suffered had reached any degree of significance and, more importantly, failed to establish that the acts of detriment (if performed) were in reliance on any representation made to her.

(2) Sacrificing the opportunity to secure gainful employment

I next touch on the Plaintiff’s claim that she suffered detriment in terms of sacrificing the opportunity to seek meaningful, paid employment in the job market, given that she had to shoulder the burden of two sets of responsibilities:

(a) tending to the Company’s affairs; and

(b) looking after her parents.

As regards tending to the Company’s affairs, it was important to set the context by highlighting that this was part of the Plaintiff’s job. The Plaintiff was employed by the Company, with her employment contract stating that she was to (among other responsibilities):

For undertaking these responsibilities, the Plaintiff was paid a monthly salary of S$2,000.

Over and above this monthly salary, the Plaintiff had been receiving a monthly allowance of S$1,000 from D2, for many years.

The Plaintiff’s acts of tending to the Company’s affairs were thus not a detriment. She was simply doing what she was paid to do. The Plaintiff nevertheless claimed that this constituted a detriment because she had accepted an annual salary of only $24,000 from the Company, when she could have secured financial independence in the job market. She contended that she:

I rejected the Plaintiff’s contention, for the following reasons:

(a) Firstly, she adduced no evidence to show how much she would have commanded in the job market, and the extent to which this would have exceeded (if at all) the monthly sum of S$3,000 (comprising salary from the Company and the allowance from D2) that she was getting from her family. In fact, it was D2’s evidence that the Plaintiff was getting paid by the Company for doing very little. I set out D2’s testimony on this point:

The Plaintiff did not attempt to obtain any qualifications to this aspect of D2’s testimony when re-examining D2 on the stand. It was only in the Plaintiff’s closing reply submissions that she sought to refute D2’s remarks above. Specifically, the Plaintiff argued that she did do some work for the Company, pointing to an email in which the Plaintiff purportedly procured financing from UOB Bank in the Company’s favour. However, this document was never drawn to D2’s attention while she was on the stand, meaning that D2 was denied the opportunity to give her views on it.

(b) Secondly, I did not understand the Plaintiff’s case to be that the time spent by her working for the Company would be discounted by a prospective employer assessing if she had relevant work experience. After all, her employment was properly documented by a signed contract setting out the scope of her responsibilities (see [139] above). That being the case, it was difficult to see why the Plaintiff’s years of employment with the Company should be regarded as an opportunity cost, if this was something that the job market could properly take account of, should she ever choose to resign from the Company and seek outside employment.

I thus concluded that there was no basis to regard the Plaintiff’s decision to work for the Company (in lieu of seeking outside employment) as a “detriment” that could support an estoppel. There was nothing to suggest that she could have secured more favourable employment terms in the job market, or that her employment with the Company had somehow adversely impacted on her ability to look for another job outside the family business.

As regards the Plaintiff’s acts of tending to her parents, there was similarly nothing to show how this had in any way prevented her from getting a job outside the family, if she was indeed so minded. As explained at [129] above, the Plaintiff failed to demonstrate that she shouldered any significant caregiving burdens, to the point that she was precluded from finding a job.

In any event, the evidence was strongly suggestive of the Plaintiff being predisposed to not seeking work (to be precise, work which did not involve taking her parents’ money). In 2006, the Plaintiff had filed an affidavit in support of her application against her husband for maintenance in MSS 1791/2006 (referred to at [7] above). In that affidavit, the Plaintiff attested that she had not worked for 21 years prior to 2006, ie, since 1985, declaring herself to be a traditional wife who preferred to stay at home and wait on her husband:

There being no suggestion of the Plaintiff securing external employment within the four years spanning 2006 (after the affidavit was filed) to 2010 (when the Arrangement/Understanding was allegedly arrived at), this meant that she had not sought a job outside of the family business for a total of 36 years, comprising the 25 years prior to 2010 plus a further 11 years thereafter (ie, up to the eviction in 2021). The Plaintiff’s claim that it was her reliance on the Arrangement/ Understanding which stopped her from finding an independent job would thus have to be assessed against this backdrop. If true, her claim meant that after the Arrangement/Understanding came into existence in 2010, her outlook on employment had somehow evolved from what it had always been for the last quarter of a century, and she was now ready to get a job outside of the family business. However, she decided to perpetuate the state of comfort which she had enjoyed for the last 25 years, by an additional 11 years, although this time her decision to refrain from getting external employment could be attributed to the Arrangement/Understanding.

This claim plainly invited incredulity. There was no persuasive explanation showing that after 2010, her mentality on getting a job was any different from what it had always been, ie, that she did not want to work. This was also corroborated by the evidence of D2, who affirmed in her AEIC that the Plaintiff “never wanted to work” and would not have worked even if presented with an opportunity to do so.

Given the evidence, the Plaintiff’s omission to seek employment could thus not be said to have arisen from reliance on any representation made to her. Rather, the evidence was strongly probative of the Plaintiff having made a lifestyle choice not to work outside of the family and live off her parents instead.

(3) Tending to the Company’s affairs

The next detriment which the Plaintiff claimed to have suffered was her expenditure of resources in tending to the Apartment. This included:

Each of these points are dealt with in turn below.

The Plaintiff claimed that she had expended a considerable amount of time, effort and resource handling, among other things, regular communications with the MCST about the Apartment. To my mind, this could not constitute a “detriment” for purposes of founding an estoppel. As explained at [139] above, the Plaintiff was paid $2,000 a month by the Company for various responsibilities, including looking after the Company’s properties. Given that liaising with the MCST fell squarely within the scope of that responsibility, it could not constitute a “detriment” – the Plaintiff was merely doing what she was contractually required (and paid) to do.

As regards the furnishings to the Apartment, the evidence militated against the notion that the Plaintiff was rendered out of pocket in any way. In her AEIC, D2 alluded to the Plaintiff’s claims of having expended considerable resources on tending to the Apartment’s furnishings, rectifications and renovations, before affirming unequivocally that the Plaintiff’s contributions were minimal and were in any event “reimbursed to her immediately”. The Plaintiff did not seek to re-examine D2 on this portion of her AEIC. I also observed that the Plaintiff herself had testified in cross-examination that she was reimbursed for expenses incurred in tending to the household:

Out of an abundance of caution, I perused the documents which the Plaintiff put forward as documentary evidence of payments for the Apartment’s furnishings. While these records may have shown that sums were incurred for various purchases, there were no corresponding records matching these outflows to the Plaintiff’s bank account, to show that she was the one personally bearing the expense.

More importantly, it was the Plaintiff’s evidence that in tending to the Apartment, she acted out of love and not in reliance on any promise to let her stay in the Apartment:

This concession thus debunked the Plaintiff’s position that her acts of tending to the Apartment could qualify as detriment supporting an estoppel. Of course, as alluded to above, she did attempt to recant this concession but I have explained (at [132] above) why I did not find the recantation to be credible.

I should add that even if the Plaintiff had incurred any personal expenditure on the Apartment’s furnishings, rectification and renovations, she failed to set out the amount that had been incurred. Sifting through the tangled cotton ball of documents that the Plaintiff had appended to her AEIC, it was difficult to tease out a global figure. While I did not expect the Plaintiff to quantify her expenses with detailed precision (especially since some of the transactions took place a while ago), I still expected her to at least give a rough indication in terms of the size of the sum incurred. That would give an idea of the size of the detriment, which would in turn be an important driver informing the court as to how the equity (if one arose on the facts) was best satisfied. As explained by the Court of Appeal in Low Heng Leon Andy v Low Kian Beng Lawrence (administrator of the estate of Tan Ah Kng, deceased) [2018] 2 SLR 799 (at [16]–[17]), the court’s discretion in satisfying the equity is guided by the following twin lodestars:

Consequently, if the sum incurred by the Plaintiff personally was relatively modest, it would be disproportionate to satisfy any equity which had arisen in her favour by granting her claim for an irrevocable right to stay in the Apartment for life, rent-free.

(4) Forbearance in respect of properties held in the Plaintiff’s name

The Plaintiff also claimed that the representation about the Arrangement/Understanding gave her the impression that she would always have a right to stay in the Apartment, thereby lulling her into relinquishing her right to stay in two other properties that were held in her name: the Parkshore Property and the Sovereign unit (see [19] above). Specifically:

According to the Plaintiff, these acts of forbearance were detrimental to her, as they left her with no other place to stay following the eviction.

Preliminarily, I noted that the alleged acts of forbearance detailed above were never pleaded. However, a complication which arose in this case was that the Defendants made a submission of no case to answer, thereby electing not to call any evidence (including evidence responding to the aforementioned unpleaded claim). A similar situation arose in Ma Hongjin, where the plaintiff sued the defendant for payment of certain sums due under a supplemental agreement. The plaintiff in that case failed to plead her claim that consideration had been furnished for the supplemental agreement, despite knowing that one of the defences being raised was that the supplemental agreement was unenforceable for lack of consideration. Notwithstanding this deficiency in the plaintiff’s pleadings, the defendant proceeded to make a submission of no case to answer. In doing so, the defendant contended that the plaintiff should not be allowed to assert that consideration was furnished, given that the plaintiff had failed to plead this. At the High Court (see Ma Hongjin v SCP Holdings Pte Ltd and another [2019] SGHC 277), Vinodh Coomaraswamy J dismissed the defendant’s objection and allowed the plaintiff to pursue her point that consideration had been furnished (albeit this point was ultimately rejected). In doing so, Coomaraswamy J commented (at [107]):

Returning to the present case, I noted that the Plaintiff’s unpleaded claim, to the effect that she suffered detriment by relinquishing the right to stay in the Parkshore Property and Sovereign unit, was expressly spelt out in her AEIC. Despite this, the Defendants saw fit to advance a submission of no case to answer and thereby elect to not adduce any evidence in response. In line with the views expressed by Coomaraswamy J in Ma Hongjin, one might argue that the Defendants, in making this election, should be regarded as having accepted the risk of the Plaintiff advancing the unpleaded claim in her submissions (which was what eventually happened) – this would then militate against the suggestion that the Defendants had been prejudiced by the Plaintiff’s failure to plead. Of course, it could alternatively be argued that a defendant who makes a submission of no case to answer is not necessarily relinquishing his procedural right to object to any unpleaded claims by the plaintiff. In other words, a defendant’s submission of no case to answer should be construed as a submission that the defendant has no pleaded case to answer, with an implicit reservation of the right to object to any unpleaded facets of the plaintiff’s case.

There was nevertheless no need for me to pronounce any conclusive views on the implications which a defendant’s submission of no case to answer might have on the plaintiff’s failure to plead. Even if I were to allow the Plaintiff to pursue her unpleaded claim that she had relinquished the right to stay in the Parkshore Property and Sovereign unit, her evidence on this point still failed to cross the prima facie threshold.

As regards the Parkshore Property, the Plaintiff had stated unequivocally in her affidavit in MSS 1791/2006 (referred to at [144] above) that this was held on trust for KTB and that she did not contribute towards its purchase. In short, the Parkshore Property was not hers to begin with. The Plaintiff adduced no countervailing evidence to show why it was her place to dictate who could stay in the Parkshore Property, if this was indeed held on trust for KTB.

As regards the Sovereign unit, the Plaintiff similarly stated in her affidavit in MSS 1791/2006 that this unit was purchased by KTB. There was no evidence of the Plaintiff having contributed to the purchase price. Even then, when the Sovereign unit was sold in 2007, she received a substantial share of the sale proceeds, to the tune of S$438,528.41. This would have by no means been a paltry sum, especially at the time of the sale, which was close to two decades ago. The Plaintiff offered no explanation as to what she did with the money. Certainly, there was no explanation as to why her share of the proceeds could not have been applied towards securing alternative accommodation of her own. It was thus difficult to see why the Plaintiff’s alleged forbearance in allowing the Sovereign unit to be sold constituted a detriment.

Conclusion on the Plaintiff’s proprietary estoppel claim

Having assessed the evidence above, I concluded that the Plaintiff failed to establish, even at the level of a prima facie case, that a representation (whether express or implied) about the Arrangement/Understanding had been made, or that she had relied on any such representation (if it had even existed) to her detriment, such that an equity had arisen in her favour.

Before concluding on the proprietary estoppel claim, I pause to opine that even if an equity had arisen in the Plaintiff’s favour, it would very likely have been satisfied by the many years of indulgence which KTB and D2 extended to her: see Chiam Heng Luan and others v Chiam Heng Hsien and others [2007] 4 SLR(R) 305 at [88]–[89]. One needs to take a step back and holistically view the backdrop against which the Plaintiff claimed to have suffered a detriment:

(a) The Plaintiff and her son had been allowed to live with her parents, rent-free, since 1994.

(b) The Plaintiff’s parents had employed more than one helper at a time to attend to the family’s needs – it was not disputed that the Plaintiff enjoyed the full benefit of the helpers’ services when living with her parents.

(c) Despite being absolved of having to pay any rent for accommodations, the Plaintiff even received a monthly allowance of S$1,000 from her mother (see [140] above). This was over and above the monthly salary of S$2,000 that the Plaintiff was receiving for tending to the Company’s properties (which included the Apartment), notwithstanding her own mother’s evidence that the efforts expended by the Plaintiff towards the Company’s affairs were not particularly significant – see [141(a)] above.

In the Plaintiff’s own words while under cross-examination:

It was thus obvious that the Plaintiff was the beneficiary of a highly favourable arrangement. This was also corroborated by her evidence in MSS 1791/2006, where the Plaintiff’s affidavit (referred to at [144] above) alluded to how her parents bore the brunt of supporting her for many years. The affidavit was peppered with affirmations to that effect, such as “I was surviving on the goodwill of my parents”, “I am living off my parents” and “I am currently surviving on my parents’ generosity”.

When the affidavit was put to the Plaintiff in cross-examination, she sought to disavow responsibility for its contents by saying that it was KTB who had (with a view to protecting the Plaintiff’s position in MSS 1791/2006) dictated the words in the affidavit, which she had then “signed blindly”. If this were true, it would only serve to emphasise the lack of credibility in the Plaintiff’s sworn evidence. I say more on this below.

Contractual right to occupy

I next move to the Plaintiff’s claim that she had a contractual licence to reside in the Apartment.

In Ram Niranjan v Navin Jatia and others and another suit [2020] 3 SLR 982 (“Ram Niranjan”), Chua Lee Ming J alluded (at [112]) to the nature of a contractual licence:

Returning to the present case, the Plaintiff did not specify exactly who the parties to the contract (underpinning the contractual licence) were. Since it was her case that the rental agreement with D2 was not genuine, this presumably meant that from the Plaintiff’s perspective, the Company owned the Apartment. That would in turn mean that under the Plaintiff’s case, the contract (on which the licence was based) was between the Company and herself, with the Company having been bound to contractual relations by the words of KTB.

I found the Plaintiff’s claim to a contractual licence to be fraught with difficulties. Firstly, as with the alleged representation underlying her claim to an estoppel, she failed to identify with any measure of particularity the offer and acceptance under which the contract underpinning the licence came to life: see Kok Kuan Hwa v Yap Wing Sang [2025] SGHC 19 at [86], as regards the considerations in determining if an oral contract has come into being.

Secondly, even if an offer had been made to the Plaintiff to let her reside in the Apartment, there was no evidence of the person making that offer (whether it was KTB or D2) holding any intention to create legal relations. It is trite that within the domestic context, the presumption is that parties do not harbour such intentions. In Ong Wui Teck (personal representative of the estate of Chew Chen Chin, deceased) v Ong Wui Swoon and another and another appeal [2019] SGCA 61 (“Ong Wui Teck”), the Court of Appeal noted (at [45]):

The Court of Appeal then referred to the seminal English Court of Appeal decision in Balfour v Balfour [1919] 2 KB 571 (at 579), where Atkin LJ (as he then was) observed that:

The Court of Appeal in Ong Wui Teck also made it clear (at [45]) that the presumption against the intention to create legal relations applied not just to arrangements between spouses, but to that between parent and child as well.

In evaluating if that presumption has been rebutted, the court will look at the facts, context and circumstances of the case: Ram Niranjan at [84]. Thus, on the facts of Ram Niranjan, Chua Lee Ming J found (at [84]) that the presumption was easily rebutted and a contractual licence was held to exist, as the family members in that case had signed a memorandum of understanding.

In contrast, there is nothing to displace that presumption on the facts of the present case before me. If anything, the presumption was reinforced by the concessions which the Plaintiff had made during cross-examination on 1 February 2024. To recapitulate, the Plaintiff had pleaded in the SoC that the acts which she allegedly performed to her detriment and which undergirded her claim to a proprietary estoppel also constituted the consideration for the contractual licence. Specifically, paragraph 13 of the SoC stated that the consideration for the contractual licence comprised the acts in paragraphs 10(c) and 11(b) of the SoC (extracted at [41] above). However, under cross-examination on 1 February 2024, the Plaintiff disavowed the suggestion that these acts were in any way quid pro quo for a contract. For example, she made it clear that her actions in taking care of her parents were out of love and nothing else (see [43]–[45] above). When the Plaintiff’s attention was drawn to paragraph 13 of the SoC, which stated that the acts in paragraphs 10(c) and 11(b) of the SoC constituted the consideration supporting a contractual licence, she conceded that this was completely wrong (see [45] above). While she recanted these concessions when cross-examination resumed the next day (ie, on 2 February 2024), I did not think that her recantations should be accepted, for the reasons set out at [132] above.

In any case, the Plaintiff’s case was bereft of particulars as to the terms of the alleged contract on which the licence was based. Presumably, the bulk of the terms would have to be implied, given the dearth of any express clauses. Yet, the Plaintiff’s pleadings failed to offer any particulars of the contract’s terms, whether express or implied, save to say that the licence was “irrevocable”. Similarly, the Plaintiff’s AEIC and oral evidence failed to offer any insights as to the shape or form of the purported contract. It appeared that the Plaintiff was quite content to leave it to me to decipher for myself the terms which such a contract might have contained. On that note, I observed that in Ram Niranjan, Chua J had implied a term into the contractual licence that the occupiers should not behave in a way as would make it unreasonable for them to insist on staying at the property. Chua J held (at [114]–[115]) that on the facts of the case before him, the implication of such a term would be appropriate pursuant to the test in Sembcorp Marine Ltd v PPL Holdings Pte Ltd and another and another appeal [2013] 4 SLR 193. Returning to the present case, I took the view that even if one were to overlook the abject lack of particulars in the Plaintiff’s pleadings and imply a contractual term that she had a licence to stay, that term would similarly have to be subject to a proviso akin to that implied by the court in Ram Niranjan: the Plaintiff was allowed to stay so long as she did not behave in a manner that would make it unreasonable for her to insist on remaining in the Apartment. It was inconceivable that KTB and D2 would have contemplated letting the Plaintiff stay in the Apartment, irrespective of how she behaved towards her family. Any failure by the parties to provide for this contingency would clearly have been a gap, for which an implied term would be required to give efficacy to the contractual licence. Such a term would, to use Chua J’s words in Ram Niranjan (at [115]), have received the family’s “unhesitating agreement had it been proposed to them then”.

That any contractual licence would have been revocable by the Plaintiff’s parents, in the face of unreasonable behaviour by the Plaintiff, was supported by evidence from both sides. During cross-examination on 1 February 2024, the Plaintiff admitted that her parents had the right to decide if she could stay in the house, agreeing that it was “entirely up to them”. Similarly, she said that if she had a discussion with D2 about whether she could stay in the Apartment, she would accept D2’s decision. These intimations were at odds with the notion of the Plaintiff having an absolute right to stay. D2 similarly contemplated that the Plaintiff’s right to stay was not unconditional, taking the view that the Plaintiff was welcome to stay in the house so long as she stopped her incessant litigation with members of the household:

Having concluded that the contractual licence (assuming it even came into being) would have been terminable in the face of unreasonable behaviour by the Plaintiff, the question would be whether the right to termination had arisen. If it had, the Plaintiff would no longer be able to rely on the contractual licence as a ground for remaining in the Apartment. In this respect, D2’s position was that the Plaintiff had behaved in an unreasonable manner as to justify ejection. For the reasons below, I agreed that this position was amply supported on the evidence.

As mentioned above, the Plaintiff had commenced a spate of litigation against her family members, which D2 stepped in to oppose. For example:

(a) The Plaintiff commenced the PPO Proceedings against Sunil over an incident of family violence that had allegedly been perpetrated against the Plaintiff in D2’s presence. D2 testified that the PPO Proceedings were unnecessary as there was no merit to the Plaintiff’s allegations. The Plaintiff ultimately withdrew the PPO Proceedings – see [13(a)] above.

(b) The Plaintiff had also commenced the LPA Challenge, during which she had filed a summons seeking an injunction restraining Sunil and the Company from dealing with KTB’s assets. It was D2’s evidence that the Plaintiff had informed various financial institutions about the summons, thereby prompting them to close the Company’s accounts and call on its loans, causing significant disruption to the Company’s operations. The LPA Challenge was eventually dismissed (see [13(b)] above), following which the Plaintiff withdrew the summons for an injunction.

(c) The Plaintiff had also commenced the Deputyship Application, which she subsequently withdrew.

Suffice to say that none of these actions which the Plaintiff had commenced culminated in success for her. The Defendants thus contended that the Plaintiff had incessantly commenced baseless litigation which necessitated her 90-year-old mother having to keep coming to court to intervene. In my view, this was a relevant factor to be placed in the weighing scales, when determining if the Plaintiff’s behaviour had been unreasonable to the point of justifying ejection.

Apart from the spate of litigation started by the Plaintiff, there was evidence of other troubles which she had stirred within the household, with the result that by the time of the eviction, D2 clearly wanted the Plaintiff out of the Apartment. While under examination by Mr Premaratne, D2 alluded to how the Plaintiff had incessantly made recordings of the family members while in the Apartment (in preparation for litigation) and fought with the helpers:

In closing submission, the Plaintiff advanced various counter arguments to discount D2’s testimony above. However, I did not find the Plaintiff’s submissions to be in any way persuasive:

(a) As regards the video recordings, the Plaintiff submitted that D2 was not even able to recall if she had watched these videos during the proceedings for the LPA Challenge. In my view however, the fact that D2 could not recall how the videos were eventually used did not alter the fact that according to D2, the Plaintiff did make those videos of her family members while in the Apartment. The Plaintiff, on her part, conceded that D2 was entitled to feel upset with the Plaintiff making those recordings in the Apartment. Additionally, the Plaintiff submitted that she could not be blamed for making videos if Sunil also made videos. It was not clear to me if the Plaintiff, by this submission, was trying to suggest that two wrongs make a right. In any event, I placed little weight on this as the Plaintiff did not attempt to get the views of D2, while the latter was on the witness stand, as to the recordings allegedly made by Sunil.

(b) As for the Plaintiff’s clashes with the helpers in the home, the Plaintiff referred to D2’s F&BP which alluded to these clashes having taken place on 16 July 2020, 18 November 2020, 24 November 2020 and 11 July 2021. The Plaintiff argued that D2’s reliance on events occurring as far back as July and November 2020 as grounds for the eviction was not credible as these points in time would have been too far prior to the eviction. Yet, I noted that the Plaintiff never sought D2’s views about the incidents in July and November 2020, while D2 was on the stand.

These submissions also demonstrated a symptomatic failure by the Plaintiff to appreciate that she had called D2 as the Plaintiff’s witness. If there was any point which the Plaintiff needed D2 to weigh in on, the Plaintiff could have simply obtained the necessary clarifications during D2’s examination-in-chief or even re-examination. However, the record was replete with instances (over and above those cited above) in which this was not done and where the Plaintiff saw fit to attack her own witness’ evidence only in closing submissions, long after D2 departed from the witness box. I set out further examples of D2’ evidence about the Plaintiff’s unreasonable behaviour, which the Plaintiff sought to undermine only in closing submissions:

(a) It was D2’s evidence that once the Plaintiff realised that D2 was siding with Sunil in the legal proceedings, the Plaintiff would often yell at D2 and act aggressively, reducing D2 to tears. In her closing submissions, the Plaintiff attacked D2’s credibility on this point, arguing that D2 had failed to provide details of the incidents. However, the Plaintiff did not attempt to seek any clarifications from D2 about the latter’s evidence, pertaining to the Plaintiff’s yelling and aggression, while D2 was giving oral evidence.

(b) D2 affirmed that the Plaintiff had procured D2’s signature on certain documents without explaining to D2 that these were release forms which the Plaintiff was going to use to access KTB’s medical records. The Plaintiff had thereafter used the medical records against D2 in the Deputyship Application. There was also a recording of a conversation in which D2 had confronted the Plaintiff about why the Plaintiff did this. In her closing submissions, the Plaintiff contended that D2 was raising this as an issue only because Sunil had scolded D2 for signing the release forms and that D2 was in any event agreeable to the release of KTB’s medical records to the Plaintiff. Again, these were points which the Plaintiff could have questioned D2 about (while D2 was still on the witness stand) but did not.

As a further instance of unreasonable behaviour, D2’s AEIC alluded to an incident where the Plaintiff had broken into the Apartment’s letterbox, taking letters that did not belong to her and changed the lock, with the result that Sunil had to replace the letterbox lock. The Plaintiff’s closing submissions sought to refute D2’s AEIC on this point, recounting that while D2 was under cross-examination, “when asked about the letterbox, [D2] did not raise any issues with [the Plaintiff] breaking into the letterbox”. I found this submission to be plainly at odds with the notes of evidence. For a complete picture, I set out the relevant exchange when D2 was being questioned by Mr Premaratne about the letterbox:

One can clearly see from the exchange above that the reason why D2 did not raise any issues about the Plaintiff breaking into the letterbox was simply because the Plaintiff failed to ask her about it, while examining D2 on the stand. This was notwithstanding that D2 had of her own accord explicitly alluded to the family changing the lock and stopping the Plaintiff from collecting the letters. Yet, Mr Premaratne did not ask her about this and instead moved on to another line of questioning.

Ultimately, the Plaintiff’s attempt to paint a picture where she lived a life of harmony with her parents did not hold water. The High Court hearing the appeal from the decision of the District Judge in the LPA Challenge remarked rather starkly that the allegedly loving relationship which the Plaintiff had with her father (ie, KTB) was exaggerated and that she did not have a good relationship with her mother (D2).

Viewing the evidence cumulatively, I accepted the evidence of D2 that the Plaintiff had very clearly demonstrated behaviour which was sufficiently unreasonable as to justify termination of the contractual licence, assuming that a contract could even be implied from the facts.

Bare licence to occupy

The Plaintiff also claimed that at the very least, she had a bare licence to remain on the property and that she was not given reasonable notice to quit.

The learned authors of Kevin Gray, Elements of Land Law (Oxford University Press, 5th Ed, 2008) (“Kevin Gray”) explain the characteristics of a bare licence (at paras 10.2.2–10.2.4):

In the present case, the Defendants took issue with the fact that the Plaintiff failed to plead her claim to a bare licence and thus asked the court to disregard the claim. I took the view that the failure to plead did not preclude the Plaintiff from relying on the notion of a bare licence. A party needs to plead material facts and not legal inferences or conclusions arising from those facts: Development Bank of Singapore Ltd v Bok Chee Seng Construction Pte Ltd [2002] 2 SLR(R) 693 at [24]. The Plaintiff’s pleadings contained all the material facts necessary to brace her argument that a bare licence existed. There was no need for her to go one step further and plead her conclusion that those facts legally amounted to a bare licence. In any case, I saw no prejudice to the Defendants which might arise from allowing the Plaintiff to make such a claim. D2 did not dispute that a bare licence did exist, while the Company and Cindy conceded that a bare licence might have existed.

Both sides proceeded on the premise that a bare licence may be terminated upon reasonable notice being given. Following from that common premise, the Plaintiff claimed that she suffered loss arising from the Defendants’ failure to give such notice, while the Defendants countered that they had in fact furnished such reasonable notice. By way of preliminary observation, I noted that there is some academic disagreement over whether there is indeed a requirement at law to give reasonable notice prior to terminating a bare licence. For example, it has been argued that a bare licence is analogous to a tenancy-at-will and, since no notice to quit is required for terminating the latter, the same should hold true for the former: see Jonathan Hill, “The Termination of Bare Licences” (2001) 60 CLJ 89 at 98–108. Nevertheless, it was not necessary for me to express any conclusion on the diverging views in this area. Even if I proceeded on the premise (as parties did) that the Defendants were required to give reasonable notice prior to terminating the bare licence, I found the Plaintiff’s claim (premised on the failure to give such reasonable notice) to be devoid of merit.

In her Defence, D2 pleaded that prior to the eviction, she had orally asked the Plaintiff to vacate the Apartment. However, I agreed with the Plaintiff that this position was contradicted by D2’s evidence on the witness stand. D2 was specifically asked if she recalled asking the Plaintiff to leave the Apartment prior to the eviction, to which she said that she could not. I was thus not minded to find that oral notice to quit had been given.

The Defendants also maintained that D2 gave the Plaintiff written notice to leave the Apartment, by way of the following two letters sent by D2’s lawyers to the lawyers for the Plaintiff:

(a) The first letter was dated 26 March 2021. By that letter, the Plaintiff was informed that Sunil was travelling from UK to visit and that D2 wanted him to stay with D2 and KTB. The letter further said that because the Plaintiff had commenced the PPO Proceedings against Sunil, she should vacate the Apartment and stay at a hotel once Sunil came over to stay. Paragraph 3 of the letter stated:

The letter also stated at paragraph 4(1):

In response, the Plaintiff’s lawyers set a letter dated 1 April 2021, in which the Plaintiff rejected the request for her to move out. The letter explained that the Plaintiff needed to stay and take care of KTB, in light of his deteriorating medical condition.

(b) The second letter was dated 6 August 2021. This letter alluded to the rising tensions between the Plaintiff and the rest of the family, brought about by the looming legal proceedings. The letter recounted that it was improper for the Plaintiff to remain in the Apartment and suggested that she live in a hotel until the proceedings for the LPA Challenge had concluded. That same day, the Plaintiff’s lawyers responded with a letter saying that the Plaintiff was “not agreeable to take up the proposed offer”.

Collectively viewed, both these letters provided sufficient notice for the Plaintiff to leave, notwithstanding her purported rejection of the requests to vacate.

The Plaintiff took issue with the fact that the letters from D2’s lawyers appeared to contemplate that the Plaintiff’s departure was to be for a temporary duration, when her ultimate ejection (as evidenced by how all her belongings were removed from the Apartment) was clearly intended to be on a more permanent basis. While the Plaintiff’s closing submissions did not explicitly set out the legal implication which she sought to draw from this, her case appeared to be that this had somehow invalidated the validity of the written notices for her to leave. While I agreed that the written notices could have been better phrased, to reinforce the indefinite nature of the eviction in the event of the Plaintiff continuing in her course of conduct, I still failed to see how this advanced the Plaintiff’s case. The Plaintiff evinced an uncanny resolve to disregard any notices from D2’s lawyers asking her to leave. It cannot be overemphasised that the letter of 26 March 2021 contained the threat of extraordinary measures for non-compliance. Yet, the Plaintiff simply swept the letter under the carpet, blissfully presuming that it did not stem from her mother’s instructions. There was no evidence of the Plaintiff approaching D2 to ask about the letter (notwithstanding that both lived under the same roof) or of D2 telling the Plaintiff that she was at liberty to disregard the letter. The Plaintiff’s evidence was that “[m]y mother has never communicated this with me, so I won’t take this seriously at all” – this betrayed a tellingly cavalier posture towards the notice for her to leave. It was not the Plaintiff’s case that her reaction would have been any less dismissive had the notice been pitched to state more clearly that the proposed removal was for a more enduring horizon.

It did not escape my attention that the length of the notice afforded by the letter of 26 March 2021 letter was extremely short, being set at only one day. However, this was not raised as an issue in the response from the Plaintiff’s lawyers (dated 1 April 2021) which, despite being contained in a rather lengthy letter, neither attempted to ask for a longer notice period nor even alluded to the length of the notice period. The length of the notice period was also not raised as an issue by the Plaintiff’s closing submissions.

Finally, any damage flowing from the failure to give sufficient notice to quit would constitute special damages and would thus have to be pleaded, as well as supported with evidence. The measure of damages for the defective notice would in turn have been informed by what a reasonable notice period would have been, on the current facts. However, the Plaintiff failed to adduce any evidence on this. In fact, when the Plaintiff was pressed in cross-examination to state her view as to what a reasonable notice period would have been, she refused to provide a duration, saying that she did not know:

It was only in her closing submissions that the Plaintiff suggested that damages be computed based on a notice period of three to seven years, with damages being calculated on the basis that she incurred S$4,200 a month for the entire duration of that notice period. This yielded a figure of S$150,000 to S$350,000.

I rejected this submission. Firstly, the proposed time horizon struck me as inordinately extravagant. What constitutes a reasonable duration of notice is highly fact sensitive. Kevin Gray states (at para 10.2.26):

The footnote to the above passage cites the case of Parker v Parker [2003] EWHC 1846 (Ch), where the Earl of Macclesfield was given two years to leave the Shirburn Castle, as that was the minimum duration needed to properly catalogue the castle library prior to transportation. In the present case, the Plaintiff failed to provide any explanation as to why she needed three to seven years to find alternative accommodations.

More importantly, apart from having failed to plead these figures, the Plaintiff also omitted to adduce any evidence on how she arrived at the three-to-seven-year duration, or the monthly rate of S$4,200. These numbers did not appear anywhere in her AEIC or oral testimony, or even in her opening statement for that matter. Instead, they surfaced only in closing submissions, meaning that the Defendants had absolutely no inkling that the numbers were going to be sprung on them after the close of evidence-taking. The Defendants were thereby denied the opportunity to clarify with the Plaintiff (while she was on the stand) about the basis of her calculations.

While the Plaintiff may only have been required to adduce prima facie evidence proving her claim, the quantification of her claim was not supported by any evidence against which that prima facie standard could be applied. I was thus of the view that even if the Defendants could be faulted for failing to give adequate notice terminating the bare licence, the Plaintiff was not entitled to any substantial damages.

Whether shares in the Company conferred a right to stay in the Apartment

The Plaintiff also claimed that she retained a beneficial interest in 80,000 shares in the Company, notwithstanding that the Kensington Trust was reflected as the legal holder of all the shares issued by the Company. While the shares were eventually transferred back to KTB in 2013 (see [6] above), the Plaintiff took the position that KTB was a bare trustee who continued to hold the shares on trust for her.

The Plaintiff then sought to rely on her alleged beneficial interest in the Company to argue that she had an interest in the Apartment (being an asset of the Company). In her pleadings, the Plaintiff contended that since she and her parents were shareholders in the Company, they would “indirectly own” the Apartment. The Plaintiff elaborated on this in her oral testimony, saying that her interest in the Company’s shares conferred upon her an interest in the Apartment.

In contrast, the Defendants contended that the 80,000 shares were held by the Plaintiff as a nominee of KTB, arguing that this was why the shares were ultimately returned to KTB in 2013. The Defendants also produced a copy of a resolution by the Company’s board of directors dated 3 April 2013, purportedly signed by KTB, D2 and the Plaintiff (the Plaintiff having still been a director of the Company at the time of the resolution). The board resolution stated that the 80,000 shares in the Plaintiff’s name were to be returned to KTB. Pertinently, the board resolution also declared that the Plaintiff had held the 80,000 shares as a nominee, on trust for KTB. The Plaintiff, on her part, disputed the authenticity of the resolution.

In my view, the Plaintiff’s claim to beneficial ownership of the 80,000 shares was irrelevant. Even if she was a shareholder of the Company, that could not in and of itself confer upon her any direct interest in the property of the Company, which is a separate legal entity: see Miao Weiguo v Tendcare Medical Group Holdings Pte Ltd (formerly known as Tian Jian Hua Xia Medical Group Holdings Pte Ltd) (in judicial management) and another [2022] 1 SLR 884 at [114]–[115].

For completeness, I also rejected the Plaintiff’s claim that she retained beneficial ownership in the 80,000 shares. Even if the board resolution that the shares be transferred back to KTB was dismissed as inauthentic, it was still clear that the Plaintiff’s claim to beneficial ownership ran counter to her own evidence at trial, where she agreed that: (a) as between KTB and the Plaintiff, she was happy to let KTB decide whether the shares were held on trust or not; and (b) KTB’s position all along was that the shares in the Company were being held on trust for his own benefit, since he was the one running the Company. The Plaintiff’s claim was also contradicted by her affidavit in MSS 1791/2006 (referred to at [144] above), in which she unequivocally deposed that she held the 80,000 shares on trust for KTB.

As explained at [163] above, the Plaintiff sought to disavow the contents of her affidavit in MSS 1791/2006 by saying that it was KTB who dictated its contents, after which she had blindly signed on it. She went so far as to agree that she had lied in the affidavit but insisted that it was KTB who made her lie. The Plaintiff had thus shown herself to be someone with no compunction about promulgating falsehoods under oath to preserve her asset position. Even if the falsehoods had been instigated by a family member, that would have done little to ameliorate her disregard for the judicial process, given that this was ultimately her affidavit, the contents of which had been affirmed by her to be true. The Plaintiff submitted that even if she had made untrue statements in her affidavit to obtain a favourable maintenance order against her husband, she ultimately did not enforce that order. In my view, this was a misconceived submission. Lying on affidavit is a serious matter and the Plaintiff’s attempt to downplay the impact of her falsehoods underscored her abject failure to appreciate the gravity of what she had done. Rather than salvage her credibility, this submission served only to further erode it.

Conspiracy claim

The Plaintiff claimed that the Defendants had conspired with Sunil to remove her from the Apartment, alleging that he had procured D2 and Cindy to sign the Board Resolutions evicting the Plaintiff. The Plaintiff contended that the Defendants’ actions were “unlawful, fraudulent and dishonest” and carried out with the predominant intention of injuring her. Specifically, she alleged that Sunil and the Defendants wanted to “punish the Plaintiff by inflicting maximum harm and embarrassment and gain an unfair advantage in the ongoing legal proceedings”.

As regards the unfair advantage, the Plaintiff suggested that the eviction was meant to confer a tactical benefit on Sunil in the PPO Proceedings . Specifically, the eviction was executed at the end of the first day of trial in the PPO Proceedings (see [12] above), with the result that the Plaintiff was unable to attend trial the next day. The Plaintiff also alleged that the eviction was calculated to bring about a state of affairs in which the alleged victim which the proposed PPO was meant to protect (ie, the Plaintiff) was no longer residing in the Apartment in which the alleged perpetrator (ie, Sunil) also resided at the time, thereby weakening the perceived need for a PPO to be issued.

To establish the tort of conspiracy, the following elements must be present (see Gimpex Ltd v Unity Holdings Business Ltd and others and another appeal [2015] 2 SLR 686 at [150]):

(a) A combination of two or more persons and an agreement between and amongst them to do certain acts.

(b) The conspirators must have harboured the intention to cause damage or injury to the plaintiff where, if the conspiracy involved the commission of acts that were lawful, that intention must have been the predominant intention.

(c) The acts were performed in furtherance of the agreement.

(d) The plaintiff suffered damage.

In my view, the Plaintiff’s claim failed to meet the first two of the elements set out above.

Whether there was an agreement between Sunil and the Defendants

As regards the first of the elements detailed above, the Plaintiff offered no details as to when the agreement between D2, Cindy and Sunil might have been conceived. There was also very little by way of pleaded particulars or evidence as to the occasion on which Sunil might have reached out to procure the signatures of D2 and Cindy on the Board Resolutions. All that the Plaintiff did say was that the acts would have been carried out “in secret”.

The best evidence of any such agreement would have come from Sunil, seeing as how he was alleged by the Plaintiff to be the mastermind behind the conspirators. However, for reasons best known to the Plaintiff, she decided not to join Sunil as a defendant to this trial. While she was of course free to select whom to sue, the reasons proffered by her for not joining Sunil as a defendant did not withstand scrutiny. She mentioned that she (like her mother) was afraid of Sunil as he was “overpowering”. However, this explanation ran counter to the Plaintiff’s conduct in having brought a recent spate of litigation against Sunil. In the end, without the benefit of Sunil’s testimony on the stand, the evidence regarding the alleged agreement remained both hazy and speculative.

The Plaintiff nevertheless sought to rely on circumstantial evidence, pointing to how D2 had been re-appointed as a director of the Company just shortly before the eviction (see [5] above). The Plaintiff suggested that this showed that Sunil must have reinstated their mother to the Company’s Board of Directors to “legitimatize” the Board Resolutions evicting the Plaintiff, by creating the veneer that it was D2 (and not Sunil) who took the initiative to remove the Plaintiff from the Apartment. The coincidental timing of D2’s appointment as director would in turn be suggestive of ongoing machinations to orchestrate the eviction.

In my view, this was nothing more than a surmise which had in any case been refuted by D2’s evidence. Specifically, D2 explained that the Plaintiff had been writing to financial institutions in which the Company held accounts, informing them about the proceedings in the LPA Challenge, as well as the summons that the Plaintiff had filed within those proceedings to restrain Sunil and the Company from dealing with KTB’s assets (see [174(b)] above). D2 explained that this had prompted the financial institutions to close the Company’s bank accounts and call on its loans, with one of the lenders advising Sunil to step down as a director. To calm the disquiet amongst the Company’s lenders stirred up by the Plaintiff’s actions, Sunil had to step down from the Board while D2 reprised her role as director in his stead. I noted that the Plaintiff did not specifically challenge D2 on this aspect of her evidence while the latter was on the stand.

Whether the Defendants had an intention to injure the Plaintiff

As regards the second element of the tort of conspiracy, I was of the view that the Plaintiff failed to establish – even at a prima facie level – that the Defendants bore any intention to cause damage to the Plaintiff, whether by lawful or unlawful means.

According to the Plaintiff’s closing submissions, the principal act undergirding the conspiracy claim was the passing of the Board Resolutions to evict her. The Plaintiff maintained that the Board Resolutions were unlawful as they were passed in breach of her irrevocable right to reside in the Apartment. I have already explained why I did not think that any such right existed, whether in equity or contract. Consequently, any claim to conspiracy by unlawful means failed.

This meant that to succeed in her conspiracy claim, the Plaintiff would have to prove conspiracy by lawful means, in which case the Defendants and Sunil must have collectively harboured the predominant intention to damage or injure the Plaintiff. However, the Plaintiff failed to adduce any evidence from which any such an intention could be inferred. To recapitulate, the Plaintiff’s case was that both D2 and Cindy were pawns that were moved by Sunil on the chessboard:

(a) In relation to D2, the Plaintiff repeatedly maintained that Sunil was the person orchestrating the eviction, using D2 as the front to do so. The Plaintiff claimed that Sunil was able to do this as D2 was “under his control” and beholden to Sunil as D2 was afraid of him. That D2 could not have been the prime mover of the eviction was demonstrated by how she could not even tell what a board resolution was (despite having purportedly been the one who signed the Board Resolutions evicting the Plaintiff) and did not remember instructing lawyers to evict the Plaintiff from the Apartment.

(b) As for Cindy, the Plaintiff maintained that Sunil was her boss and she was accustomed to acting on his instructions (see [2] above).

In my view, none of these assertions cast any insights into what intentions D2 and Cindy might have personally harboured, when passing the Board Resolutions. There was nothing to show that they shared Sunil’s intention to hurt the Plaintiff (assuming Sunil harboured that intention).

Critically, the fact that D2 bore no intention (whether predominant or otherwise) to injure the Plaintiff was consistent with the Plaintiff’s unequivocal concession during cross-examination on 1 February 2024 that there was no basis to allege that D2 harboured the intention, as pleaded in the SoC, to punish the Plaintiff (see [47] above). While the Plaintiff may have tried to recant this concession, I have explained why I found no merit in her attempt to do so (see [132] above). Of course, the Plaintiff’s concession pertained only to D2 and not to the other two alleged conspirators, ie, Cindy or the Company. However, the withdrawal of the Plaintiff’s allegations as against D2 meant that the factual matrix contained very little remaining material to implicate Cindy and the Company on the conspiracy claim.

As a side observation, the Plaintiff’s case theory about D2 being beholden to Sunil’s influence, to the point of being afraid of him, fell apart dramatically when D2 took the stand. D2 had, in response to Mr Premaratne’s question as to whether she was afraid of Sunil, stated unequivocally that she was not. D2 even pointedly quipped that, if anything, Sunil should be afraid of her since she was his mother. D2 testified that the decision to evict the Plaintiff, rather than having been taken pursuant to any intention to injure the latter or out of fear of Sunil, was taken because both D2 and Sunil felt that the Plaintiff was causing a lot of trouble in the Apartment. In her closing reply submissions, the Plaintiff sought to refute D2’s testimony (about D2 not being afraid of Sunil) by arguing that there were various instances in which D2 allegedly faced difficulties in controlling Sunil when the latter lost his temper, as well as suggesting that D2 was financially dependent on Sunil. Again, I observed that the Plaintiff did not seek D2’s responses on these points, despite having put D2 on the witness stand.

Conclusion on the conspiracy claim

Consequently, the Plaintiff’s claim on conspiracy failed, even at the prima facie threshold. She failed to adduce the requisite evidence to establish the existence of the agreement between the alleged conspirators, as well as of the intention to injure or damage the Plaintiff.

I would add that even if the Plaintiff had succeeded in establishing the other elements of the tort of conspiracy, she failed to show how the tort might have caused her any damage. As regards the Plaintiff’s suggestion that the tactical timing of the eviction was calculated to hurt her case and confer an unfair advantage on Sunil in the PPO Proceedings (see [201] above), the Plaintiff failed to demonstrate what damage flowed from this. After all, it was the Plaintiff who ultimately decided to withdraw the PPO Proceedings in October 2021 (see [13(a)] above), there being no suggestion that the withdrawal had anything to do with the eviction.

Dishonest assistance claim

As regards the Plaintiff’s claim for dishonest assistance, the Plaintiff alleged that she was entitled to damages as against D2 and Cindy because both these persons had wrongfully and fraudulently assisted, induced and/or procured the Company to evict the Plaintiff.

In my view, the Plaintiff failed to establish a prima facie case for this claim. For her to succeed in an action for dishonest assistance, she had to establish the following (see George Raymond Zage III and another v Ho Chi Kwong and another [2010] 2 SLR 589 at [20]):

The Plaintiff’s closing submissions failed to list out these elements, much less explain how each of them were met by the evidence. I could only surmise that her case was that:

However, the Plaintiff failed to identify the trust which had allegedly been breached. In fact, she failed to demonstrate why the Company, or even D2 or Cindy for that matter, should be regarded as owing any fiduciary duties to her.

Conclusion

In light of my findings above, I accept the Defendants’ submission that they have no case to answer. The Plaintiff’s claims are dismissed, as they have not been established, even to a prima facie standard.