Lim Young Ching v Lim Tai Ching

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Judge: Lai Siu Chiu SJ
• Judgment Date: 19 May 2020
• Neutral Citation: [2020] SGHC 103
• Court: High Court (Singapore)
• Docket Number: Suit No 1196 of 2018
• Year: 2020
• Published date: 23 May 2020
• Hearing Date: 03 January 2020,20 November 2019,19 November 2019,21 November 2019
• Plaintiff Counsel: Lau See-Jin Jeffrey (Lau & Company)
• Defendant Counsel: Justin James Zehnder & Kertar Singh s/o Guljar Singh (Kertar & Sandhu LLC)
• Subject Matter: Gifts,Inter vivos,Trusts,Express trusts
• Citation: [2020] SGHC 103

Lai Siu Chiu SJ: Introduction

Lim Young Ching (“the Plaintiff”) and Lim Tai Ching (“the Defendant”) are siblings with the Plaintiff being the older brother. In Suit No 1196 of 2018, (“this Suit”) the Plaintiff is claiming from his younger brother both movable and immovable properties that were part of the estate of their late mother. The siblings’ father Lim Seng Giap (“the Father”) passed away on 12 September 2010 while their mother Chew Ah Moy (“the Deceased”) passed away intestate on 9 February 2013. The siblings were the only children of the Father and the Deceased. The Plaintiff is now 48 years old while the Defendant is four years younger. The Defendant is far better educated than the Plaintiff being an engineer with post-graduate qualifications while the Plaintiff holds an “O” levels certificate.

In this Suit, the Plaintiff alleges that substantial cash sums that he handed over the years to the Deceased prior to her demise are held by the Defendant. He requires the Defendant to account for those monies as well as to give the Plaintiff his 49.5% share in a Housing & Development Board (“HDB”) flat situated at Block 22, Ghim Moh Link #xx-xxx, Singapore 271022 (“the Flat”), which the Plaintiff requests to be sold. The Flat previously belonged to the Deceased and is currently occupied by the Defendant and his family.

The facts

Whilst the parties broadly agreed on the general sequence of events (ie, the chronology of major events that led to the present dispute), the Plaintiff and the Defendant offered very different slants in their respective affidavits of evidence-in-chief (“AEIC(s)”). In this section, I will canvass the salient facts whilst going through the parties’ contrasting characterisations of the various key events.

The Plaintiff’s characterisation of key events in his AEIC

The basis of the Plaintiff’s claim goes back to 2008 when the siblings’ parents lived at another HDB flat situated at Block 12A, Ghim Moh Road #xx-xx, Singapore 271012 (“the old flat”). The HDB acquired the old flat for selective en-bloc redevelopment and in its place, the HDB offered the parents the Flat. Payment for the Flat’s purchase price of S$342,086.05 was made as follows:

Item	Amount
Proceeds from the sale to HDB of the old flat	S$254,004
Cash contribution from the Plaintiff	S$12,833.35
Contributions withdrawn from the Deceased’s CPF account	S$21,684
The Defendant’s CPF withdrawals	S$54,564.70

The total sum paid was S$343,086.05 (which was S$1,000 more than the purchase price of the Flat). The purchase of the Flat was completed on 19 October 2011. In addition to his contribution towards the purchase price of the Flat, the Plaintiff claimed he paid in November 2011 another S$82,385 towards the interior design and renovation cost of the Flat. As will be made clear, the Flat was at the heart of the disagreement between the parties.

The Father passed away in 2010. Upon his death, the Father’s share in the old flat passed to the Deceased presumably, under the right of survivorship in a joint tenancy. The Deceased and the Defendant moved into the Flat in or about December 2011.

According to the Plaintiff, he went to work in foreign exchange companies in Russia starting from 1995. Over the years, the Plaintiff continued working in the foreign exchange industry, first in Russia, then in Japan (Tokyo), Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar and finally in Vietnam where he is currently based.

It was while he was working in Vietnam in 2006 that the Plaintiff met one Tran Thi Ngo Thanh, a Vietnamese lady who was his girlfriend at that point. They returned to Singapore together in 2007 and got married. With his wife, the Plaintiff has had a daughter and a son. The Plaintiff deposed in his AEIC¹ that his family of three (including his daughter who was born in November 2007) lived at the old flat for about a year with his parents and the Defendant prior to the Father’s demise. According to the Defendant, the Plaintiff’s wife and the Deceased had a big fight one day and the Deceased chased out the Plaintiff’s family.² The Defendant testified the Plaintiff had to rent a flat to house his family. The Plaintiff’s son was born in January 2013 after he acquired his own HDB flat in 2009.

While working overseas, the Plaintiff claimed he made and lost a lot of money. When he made money, he said he would pass to the Deceased 30% of his salaries for safekeeping, starting in 2008. The first sum the Plaintiff handed to the Deceased was S$100,000 followed by S$28,000 which the Plaintiff deposed was used by his parents to repay the outstanding HDB loan on the old flat. It was also the Plaintiff’s case that he doted on his younger brother so much that he gave the Defendant S$30,000 to help the latter buy a motor vehicle without the need to take out a car loan.

On 9 April 2008, the Plaintiff won S$1m (“the lottery winnings”) from S$500 worth of 4D lottery tickets that he bought. He received the cheque for S$1m issued by Singapore Pools the next day and immediately deposited it into his POSB account number xxx-xxxxx-9 (“the Plaintiff’s POSB account”). Upon the cheque’s clearance, he said he transferred S$800,000 therefrom to the Deceased’s DBS account on 12 April 2008. However the evidence produced in court showed that the Deceased placed into four deposits in her DBS joint fixed deposit account number xxx-xxxxxx-17 (“the DBS joint fixed deposit account”), which she held jointly with the Defendant, only S$700,000, comprising three deposits of S$200,000 each and one deposit of S$100,000. The Plaintiff deposed in his AEIC that he did not know what the Deceased did with the remaining S$100,000 from the S$800,000 he gave to her, and postulated that she might have placed it “in another bank account, as she thought fit and proper”.

In March 2009, the Plaintiff purchased a HDB flat at Block 7, Ghim Moh Road #xx-xxx, Singapore 270007 (“the Plaintiff’s Flat”) at a price of S$594,527.60; completion of the purchase was scheduled for July 2009. The Plaintiff requested the Deceased to return his money to enable him to pay for the Plaintiff’s Flat. The Deceased liquidated her various fixed deposits and transferred S$595,000 to the Plaintiff’s POSB account.

The Plaintiff deposed he would give to the Deceased sums of money amounting to either “$10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000” in cash to hold on trust and left it to her to decide what she would do with his money. Although he deposed he did not keep track of the various sums of money he passed to the Deceased over the years until her demise, the Plaintiff nevertheless claimed he could recall roughly how much he had passed to her over the years. He deposed³ that as recent as two months before her demise, ie, December 2012, he “remembered” handing over to the Deceased cash of S$100,000. In his AEIC, the Plaintiff termed those monies that he handed over to the Deceased for safekeeping as “entrusted monies”.

The Plaintiff also had his own bank account (with HSBC) which he maintained from 2008 until he closed it in June 2010.

The result of the imprecise number of times (and the amounts) that the Plaintiff claimed he handed cash to the Deceased was that the Plaintiff’s AEIC contained sentences such as: “This S$50,000⁴ [in the DBS joint fixed deposit account] could have been monies given by me to my late mother.” [emphasis added] “…giving smaller sum of $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 in physical cash to my late mother to hold upon trust, she could have put such monies of $50,000 and $100,000 in fixed deposits at fixed deposits unknown to me, which she withdrew and deposited into the said POSB sole account number XXXXXX10 and then placed them into fixed deposits…”⁵ [emphasis added] “It was possible that I had the $100,000 in one lump sum as stated in paragraphs 39 to 41 above.”⁶ [emphasis added]

The Plaintiff deposed in his AEIC that besides the DBS joint fixed deposit account, the Deceased maintained a joint (alternate mandate) POSB savings account with the Defendant (“the POSB joint alternate account”) as well as a separate POSB account in her sole name (“the Deceased’s POSB sole account”). He dwelt at length on all three accounts.

By the Plaintiff’s reckoning, the Deceased had at her death the following fixed deposits in the DBS joint fixed deposit account:

Deposit No	Period of deposit	Withdrawal date	Interest rate	Principal & interest (in S$)	Remarks
190606	20/06/2012–20/06/2013	21/05/2013	0.05	50,000 18.75	Premature Withdrawal
190607	20/06/2012–20/06/2013	21/05/2013	0.05	100,000 37.50	Premature Withdrawal
120405	13/10/2012–13/04/2013	-	0.25	100,000 124.66	-
131108	14/11/2012–13/05/2013	-	0.25	49,999 61.99	-
151109	16/11/2012–16/05/2013	-	0.25	49,999 61.99	-
120405	13/04/2013–14/10/2013	21/05/2013	0.00	100,124.66	Premature Withdrawal
131108	14/05/2013–14/11/2013	21/05/2013	0.00	50,060.99	Premature Withdrawal
151109	16/05/2013–16/11/2013	21/05/2013	0.00	50,060.99	Premature Withdrawal
Total				550,244.64 304.89

In his AEIC,⁷ the Plaintiff said the total deposits were S$350,302.89 (inclusive of interest thrown away). At another paragraph of his AEIC,⁸ the Plaintiff deposed that as at 31 December 2010, the Deceased held five deposits, of which the principal amount totalled S$349,998.00 which she held in trust for him. At yet another paragraph of his AEIC,⁹ the Plaintiff asserted that the total entrusted funds with the Deceased should be S$550,302.89.

The Plaintiff further claimed that as at the date of her demise, the POSB joint alternate account had a balance of S$140,183.80; he claimed he was entitled to 50% of this...