Estate: widow loses to husband’s children
A WOMAN who got married to her husband while he was still married to his first wife has failed to convince the Namibian Supreme Court that her marriage was legal.
She approached the Supreme Court after the High Court dismissed her application to have her marriage with the deceased declared putative.
Anastasia Amunyela and the late Phillip Amunyela met in March 1995 while she was studying in London. He told her he was separated from his wife and left her with their children in their marital homebefore moving to London.
A year later, in August 1996, the couple got married in London. They had one boy together.
Amunyela died in Namibia without a will in November 2014. Anastasia was subsequently the executrix of Amunyela’s estate. She appointed a legal representative to assist her. She was told that 50% of the property in Windhoek – the major asset in the estate – belonged to Amunyela’s children from his previous marriage, and she needed their consent to buy it from them for R3.1 million.
Amunyela’s children refused to sign the consent forms. They argued that in order to consider the sale and grant consent, they wanted copies of letters appointing her as the executrix of the estate, a valuation of the property, and a draft deed of sale.
They also wanted to know whether she and Amunyela remarried after their father divorced their mother. Anastasia said that’s when she learnt that Amunyela actually got divorced three years after their marriage and this rendered their marriage null and void.
Anastasia told the court she was not aware that Amunyela was still married to his ex-wife when they got married.She asked the court to declare her marriage legal and in community of property as she was entitled to Amunyela’s half share of the estate.
Not declaring the marriage putative would prejudice her, Anastasia argued, because she purchased the property in 2001 after renting it for some time from the government, and she was the exclusive owner of the property according to the deed of transfer.
Amunyela’s children denied the marriage between her and their father was legal. She knew their father was not divorced at the time she married him and if she wasn’t, she definitely became aware in 2006 when their mother purchased their father’s share of the marital home, they argued.
In the paperwork, it was stated that the couple divorced in 1999, and Anastasia initialled each page of th documents she signed as a witness, so she must have seen the year of the divorce. Anastasia asked the court not to rely on her signature because she did not read the documents.
The children said they found it unlikely that Anastasia was not aware of the fact that their father was convicted of bigamy in the year 2000. She had no explanation how she was unaware of his conviction.
The appeal court ruled it was highly unlikely that Amunyela would have been convicted of bigamy without it coming to Anastasia’s attention because she claimed that they were close as a couple. Appellant (Anastasia) failed to convince us that while she might not have known at the time of her marriage that he was still married to his ex-wife, she learnt of the defect in her marriage long before he husband died,” read the judgment. The Supreme Court upheld the high court’s ruling and dismissed her application.