Family feud over dead mother’s Cremorne house ends with one sibling arrested.

By ANNA USHER

They say you can’t choose your family, and that’s certainly the case for two sisters tangled up in a bitter family feud over their dead mother’s Cremorne home.

Estimated to be worth four million dollars, the property has sparked a legal stoush between the siblings after one of them refused to move out of the property, leading to her arrest.

The sisters’ mother died in 2021 aged 93. After a small legacy to charity, she left her $4.2 million estate to her daughters equally. The major asset was a house at Cremorne with an estimated value of $3.9 million.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Probate was granted to the sisters in 2022, allowing the estate to be distributed. But one of the pair delayed the sale of the home by staying put in the house for years after their mother’s death.

In a decision last month, Justice Michael Slattery said the response of the sister living in the home “appears to have been simply delay, obfuscation, diversion, and ultimately no communication at all”. This was an “unacceptable” delay in the administration of the estate, he said.

Justice Slattery said the continued occupation of the property ‘paralysed the administration of the estate’ and unfairly denied the sister not living in it ‘half of the capital of the estate to which she is entitled’.

Last December, the administrator launched civil proceedings to gain possession of the property to sell it.

The sister living in it was ordered to appear in court on February 7, but did not show up.

Justice Slattery said it was a ‘reasonable inference’ that the sister had ‘formed the view that it is to her advantage to continue to ignore the court so that she can occupy the Cremorne property’.

When the sister again failed to turn up, the judge issued a warrant for her arrest ‘to bring her to court to require her to answer the court’s process in person and engage with the looming future issue that she may be removed from the Cremorne property’.

When she finally fronted the court in late February, the judge thanked ‘the sheriff and police involved in the execution of that warrant’.

‘Being brought to court forcibly, confronting though it may be, will give her a chance to organise herself and will reduce the even more traumatic effect if she is later suddenly removed from the Cremorne property,’ he said.

The sister living in the home agreed to leave it by April 4, and Slattery made orders about artworks and photographs in the home. The administrator will take possession and sell the house.