CHE'SOM BINTI ABDULLAH v QURRATU AIN BINTI MOHAMED YUSOPE

Facts

The claimant, a widow and lifelong housewife with little formal education who speaks and writes Malay, bought an HDB flat in Bedok with her husband on 1 March 1996 for $218,000. When the husband's health declined in 2016, the couple turned to their eldest daughter, the defendant, a property agent of some 23 years' experience, for help with the mortgage. In 2017, at two HDB meetings where HDB officers explained the documents in Malay, the parents signed papers adding the daughter as a joint tenant, and an HDB loan was taken out with the daughter responsible for repayments. The completion documents were signed on 3 May 2017. The husband died on 18 September 2018.

Family relations broke down after the daughter remarried. According to the claimant, she and her husband only learned later that the daughter had been made a joint tenant; the daughter said her father had planned for her to take over the flat and the claimant had agreed. In Originating Claim No 214 of 2023 the claimant sought to set aside the transfer and remove the daughter from the register, relying on fraudulent and negligent misrepresentation, mistake, non est factum and presumed undue influence.

Issues

1. Whether the claimant understood the completion documents she signed on 3 May 2017.
2. Whether, as a result, the claims in misrepresentation, mistake and non est factum could succeed.
3. Whether the transfer was vitiated by presumed undue influence.

Holding

The High Court dismissed the claim in its entirety, finding that the claimant had not proved she failed to understand the transfer or that her consent was vitiated, so the daughter remained a joint tenant of the flat.

Reasoning

The burden lay on the claimant. HDB officers had explained the transfer in Malay, including the effect of joint tenancy and survivorship, and the claimant raised no queries; the HDB officer's account was admitted by consent and accepted by the claimant in cross-examination. Her explanation that she was distracted by her husband's asthma attack appeared only late, was inconsistent across her affidavits and testimony, and her understanding of the transaction seemed selective. The parents' worry that the daughter's new husband might inherit the flat suggested they knew she was a joint tenant. A family friend, whom the court found credible, testified that in 2018 the claimant had said she was relieved the daughter had taken over the mortgage.

Because she had not shown that she misunderstood what she signed, no misrepresentation could have been operative, and there was no fundamental mistake or radical difference between what was signed and what she thought she signed, so those claims failed.

On undue influence, the court applied BOM v BOK and another appeal [2019] 1 SLR 349. A relationship of trust and confidence existed, since the claimant relied on her daughter as a property professional, which the daughter accepted on the stand. But the transaction did not call for an explanation: it gave the parents an immediate benefit by letting them stay in the flat, was explicable on family grounds, and the claimant's later wish to add only one son contradicted her case that the flat was meant for all four children. A joint tenancy could also be severed, though that relief was not claimed. With no presumption arising, the claim failed.

From the judgment