SINGAPORE COURT REJECTED A BID BY MISTRESS OF A DEAD BUSINESSMAN

SINGAPORE — The Court of Appeal has rejected a bid by the mistress of a dead businessman to get his estate to pay maintenance for their two children.
But Singapore’s highest court said its decision was made with regret, as its hands were tied by what it considered an unfair law.

• In his judgment, released on Monday, Judge of Appeal Chao Hick Tin called for the law to be changed, saying there were compelling reasons to do so.
• “It would be unfair to punish innocent children by denying them maintenance which a legitimate child would receive upon his father’s death, particularly where the father, as in the present case, has been supporting the child,” he wrote.
• The case concerns a married man who began a relationship with an employee nine years younger than him in 1996.
• The woman later stopped working, and they had two daughters, born in 1999 and 2001.
• The parties in the suit cannot be named to protect the children, who are now in primary school.
• While the man was alive, he gave his mistress S$3,000 (RM7,300) a month to bring up the children. But after his death in February last year, aged 60, the payments ended.
• As he had not made a will, his mistress went to his grown-up children and asked for the payments to continue.
• They hesitated initially, fearing that continuing with the payments would reveal the affair to their mother and devastate her.
• But the widow eventually found out, and decided that smaller monthly sums would be provided for the girls’ upkeep, as they were not to blame for what had happened.
• Unhappy with the reduced payments, the mistress, now 51, went to court to seek the S$3,000 she received previously. The High Court dismissed her case and she appealed.
• Her lawyers, George Pereira and John Tan, argued that ‘“egitimacy had gradually become an inconsequential factor in many aspects of Singapore law today”.