The Supreme Court has concluded a 30-year legal dispute in favour of a mother over ownership of a residential property in Mirihana, after dismissing an appeal filed by her son and upholding lower court rulings.<\/p>\n
The case centred on a property originally transferred in October 1987 by the mother to her son, Thilakasiri<\/strong>, through a deed that appeared to show an outright sale. However, the Supreme Court found that the transfer was made only to facilitate a bank loan using the property as security, and not with the intention of transferring true beneficial ownership.<\/p>\n A three-judge bench comprising Chief Justice Preethi Padman Surasena<\/strong>, Justice Janak De Silva<\/strong>, and Justice Arjuna Obeyesekere<\/strong> unanimously upheld the decisions of the District Court of Mount Lavinia and the Civil Appellate High Court, both of which had ruled in favour of the mother.<\/p>\n The Supreme Court held that the son was effectively holding the property in trust for his mother under the legal principle of constructive trust as set out in Section 83 of the Trusts Ordinance. The Court further noted that although written deeds generally carry strong legal weight, Section 83 allows courts to consider surrounding circumstances to determine the true intention behind a property transfer.<\/p>\n Evidence presented showed that the mother had originally purchased the land and built the home herself, and that the property was her only residence. It was also established that the bank loan obtained through the transfer was used to expand the family home.<\/p>\n The son argued that he had genuinely purchased the property for Rs. 125,000, but the Court rejected this claim after evaluating the overall circumstances and evidence.<\/p>\n The judgment reaffirmed that beneficial ownership does not automatically follow the wording of a deed when clear evidence shows that the transfer was intended only for financial facilitation purposes.<\/p>\n The Court concluded that the mother never intended to permanently transfer ownership, and therefore the son was legally obliged to transfer the property back to her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Supreme Court has concluded a 30-year legal dispute in favour of a mother over ownership of a residential property in Mirihana, after dismissing an appeal filed by her son and upholding lower court rulings. The case centred on a property originally transferred in October 1987 by the mother to her son, Thilakasiri, through a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2358,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2357"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2359,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2357\/revisions\/2359"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}