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Alternative investments may offer attractive rates of return, but they should never be entered into without professional advice. A High Court case concerning numerous small investors who staked their life savings on the success of an ill-fated hotel development served as a cautionary tale. With a view to obtaining long leases of hotel rooms when the project was complete, the investors paid deposits totalling about £4 million. The building work was, however, less than 70 per cent complete when the company behind the development entered administration. The building was mortgaged to...

No one knows when death will come calling and it is equally a truism that, if you fail to make a professionally drafted will, you store up trouble for your loved ones after you are gone. As an unusual Family Court ruling showed, that is particularly so if you own property abroad. The case concerned a father who owned a property in France, where he died without having made a will. In accordance with French succession law, the property passed in equal shares to his son and daughter. Difficulties arose,...

Boundaries between properties are usually marked by a line on a small-scale Land Registry plan but they may be invisible on the ground. Precisely that difficulty was the root cause of a bitter dispute between owners of two riverside homes. The owners could not agree as to the exact location of the boundary dividing their gardens, an issue that affected the extent of their desirable river frontages. The dividing line was not marked by a fence, wall or any other barrier, giving rise to disputes as to precisely where each...

There can be few questions of greater importance than 'Who is my parent?'. A judge made that point in taking the unprecedented step of enabling rectification of an adopted woman's birth certificate to reflect the identity of her natural father. The woman's natural mother was from an aristocratic family and was unmarried and barely out of her teens when she gave birth to her. The woman was adopted as a baby and had spent much of the last 40 years trying to trace her birth father. She engaged private investigators...