Fresh discrepancies in the will of late industrialist Sunjay Kapur emerged on Tuesday as the Delhi High Court heard a high-octane legal case over his Rs 30,000 crore estate. His children have levelled a litany of charges, including deliberate digital manipulation of files, the existence of secret WhatsApp groups, and a forged signature trail. The Court was also told on Tuesday that his purported will referred to Kapur as “she” and “her” in multiple places — ‘raising doubts about whether he ever saw, signed, or approved the document’.
Samaira and Kiaan Kapur (his children with actor Karisma Kapoor) have flagged several discrepancies to allege that the document was edited digitally fabricated to divert the entire Rs 30,000-crore estate to his third wife Priya Kapur. Senior advocate Mahesh Jethmalani told the court that the document was “a deliberate fabrication engineered by Priya Kapur to seize control of every major asset”— including shares, trusts, and real estate—while sidelining both Sunjay’s children and his mother, Rani Kapur.
“Author of the clause could not have been Sunjay Kapur. Clauses in question are not the handiwork or the design of the testator Sunjay Kapur. The female form of testator is used… Testator is now a she. This is an absurdity. It shows the audacity which people have to present something like this in court. In short Sunjay Kapur has signed this will as a woman,” he said.
“When you find ‘she’ and ‘her’ four times in a will supposedly written by Sunjay Kapur — a man known for precision and pride in his image — it’s impossible to believe he drafted it…A document like this would have ruined his reputation…There is no chain of custody, no signature, no handwriting, no registration — and no trace of Sunjay’s involvement. He’s a digital ghost in his own will,” the senior lawyer added.
Who wrote the will?
“Unless Sunjay with an unsound mind incapable of reading… (He) could have never signed this. It is replete with feminine pronoun. It says her last will, her witness and her presence. The feminine pronoun is used in most crucial part to describe him. When you get ‘she and her’ in 4 places, it is incredulous that Sunjay Kapur with all his knowledge could have drafted this,” the counsel said.
He added that the children’s step-mother, Priya Kapur, and other defendants were silent on who has prepared the will.
“What is so secretive about it that you don’t want to give it to the beneficiaries? Our case is a very clearly that this is not the testator’s will and in such cases burden of discharging every suspicious circumstance is on them (defendants)… Here we have a fundamental question if the Will was signed by testator or by a woman in the declaration clause,” he added.