Manjula A/P Manikam v Sharmila A/P Nageswaran (WA-22NCvC-674-11/2025)

WA-22NCvC-674-11/2025 Kand. 27 20/07/2026 15:31:03 DALAM MAHKAMAH TINGGI MALAYA DI KUALA LUMPUR DALAM WILAYAH PERSEKUTUAN KUALA LUMPUR MALAYSIA CIVIL SUIT NO.: WA-22NCvC-674-11/2025 BETWEEN MANJULA A/P MANIKAH (NRIC No.: 790606-14-5650) PLAINTIFF AND SHARMILA NAGESWARAN (NRIC No.:861116-75-5048) DEFENDANT GROUNDS OF JUDGMENT Prologue: A House in Salak Selatan Baru

1. Every family has a house that holds its history. It is a place where children are raised, where old age arrives, and where the question of what remains and for whom is eventually confronted. For the family of Manikam A/L Kalimuthu, that place was No. 313, Jalan 13A, Salak Selatan Baru, Kuala Lumpur. There, Manikam and his wife Letchemy raised four children. It is also there that Manikam lived out the last years of his life. And from there, in January 2022, he journeyed to an estate planning office to set down, in formal terms and with witnesses, his final wishes for the world he would one day leave behind. He had enshrined his last Will and Testament.

2. Manikam passed away on 16 November 2024, aged eighty-one. Letchemy had predeceased him by four years, departing in December 2020. What remained in the wake of Manikam's death were his four children, namely Chandru, his eldest son; the twins Jayaseelan and Jayabalan; and Manjula, his youngest daughter, along with a family home, two parcels of property, and a Will that not everyone was prepared to accept.

3. This is the story of that Will, and of the proceedings that arose when one member of the family sought to have it set aside.

Part I: The Making of a Will

4. On 12 January 2022, Manikam executed his Last Will and Testament before Rockwills Corporation Sdn Bhd ("Rockwills") the reputable and established estate planning company. The document was witnessed by two persons in accordance with the law. Its terms were deliberate and precise.

5. Manikam directed that his trust properties, which comprise a parcel of land under Geran 162442, Lot 16376 in Selangor, and the family home at Salak Selatan Baru, be held on trust for the benefit of his grandchildren, namely Divakar, who is Manjula's own son, together with Vedhasruthi, Harmitha, and Anbucezhiyan, the children of his son Jayaseelan and daughter-in-law Sharmila. The deceased's own children were not the beneficiaries, but they were appointed trustees, the stewards of a legacy intended for the next generation. To administer the estate and give effect to his wishes, Manikam appointed Sharmila Nageswaran, his daughter-in-law, as executrix.

6. There was one further dimension to the Will that would prove consequential. Chandru, who is the eldest son, had lived in the family home and might, in other circumstances, have expected to be provided for, had appeared nowhere among the beneficiaries. His children, too, received nothing. This was not an oversight. It was a choice that Manikam had made.

7. The Kooperasi NLFCS Berhad nomination form, executed in December 2021, just weeks before the Will, told the same story: Manikam had named only Jayaseelan, Jayabalan, and Manjula as nominees. Chandru was absent there as well. The pattern was consistent, the intention unmistakable. A father had looked at his children and, for reasons that were his alone to hold, decided that one branch of his family would not share in what he left behind.

8. The reasons, however, were not entirely private. They had roots in events that unfolded within the family home itself. Theft, a police report, and a falling-out whose consequences persisted to the very end of Manikam's life.

Part II: The Daughter-in-Law

9. Then, there is Sharmila Nageswaran who came to stand at the centre of this dispute. It is necessary to understand her place within the family.

10. Sharmila had entered the family through marriage to Jayaseelan in March 2008. The match had been arranged by Manikam and Letchemy themselves, for Sharmila came from the same family lineage. It is a connection that, at the time, the patriarch and matriarch of the household had seen as fitting. After the wedding, Sharmila and Jayaseelan took up residence in the family home. Around 2011, the couple moved to a nearby housing estate, not as a consequence of any rupture in relations, but simply because the household had grown too large. Even after that departure, Sharmila remained a dutiful presence in Manikam's life. She visited regularly. She drove Manikam and Letchemy to their medical appointments. In the years between 2018 and 2020, as Letchemy's health deteriorated and she required extended care at Hospital Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. It was Sharmila who attended to her — not the eldest son, and not the other children, but the daughter-in-law who had moved out of the house a decade earlier.

11. Jayaseelan, for his part, contributed his salary to the household. The evidence before this Court showed that it was this contribution, together with the continued efforts of Manikam and Letchemy themselves, that kept the family financially afloat. While Chandru, who had returned to the family home around 2015 or 2016 after failing to meet his rental obligations elsewhere, made no meaningful financial contribution at all.

12. These were the human contours of the family that Manikam had navigated in his final years. They explain, in ways that no legal document can fully capture, why the Will read as it did.

Part III: The Grant of Probate, and the Challenge

13. After Manikam's death, Sharmila moved to give effect to her appointment as executrix. She filed the OS No. WA-32NCVC-111 01/2025 on 15 January 2025 ("OS 111"), and on 6 February 2025, the High Court of Kuala Lumpur granted her a Grant of Probate. The process was conducted ex parte.

14. It was at this point that Manjula, the youngest child and the Plaintiff in these proceedings, entered the legal arena. In June 2025, she filed Citation proceedings in the OS 111. Those proceedings were, however, procedurally defective, and during case management in November 2025, the Senior Assistant Registrar informed Manjula's solicitors that they had taken the wrong procedural path. A civil suit was the appropriate vehicle. Duly redirected, Manjula filed this action with the Statement of Claim ("SOC") on 21 November 2025 ("this Suit").

15. The claim sought sweeping relief:

(ii) a declaration that Manikam had died intestate;

(iii) revocation of the Grant of Probate;

(iv) an injunction restraining Sharmila from dealing with the estate assets; and

16. Sharmila filed the Statement of Defence on 23 December 2025 ("SOD"). Then, in February 2026, she filed Enc. 8 herein, an application to strike out this Suit in its entirety before any trial could take place. It is that application which came before this Court.

Part IV: The Law's Threshold

17. The power to strike out a claim without proceeding to trial under O18 R19 of the Rules of Court 2012 ("ROC 2012") is one of the most drastic instruments available to a civil court. It forecloses the opportunity for a full hearing, and courts have therefore long insisted that it be exercised only in the clearest of cases. The Supreme Court, in Bandar Builder Sdn Bhd & Ors v United Malayan Banking Corporation Bhd [1993] 3 MLJ 36 SC, articulated the governing principle with clarity: this summary process is reserved for cases that are, on their face, obviously unsustainable cases where the claim taken at its highest, simply cannot succeed in law or on the pleaded facts. The Federal Court affirmed in Serac Asia Sdn Bhd v Sepakat Insurance Brokers Sdn Bhd [2013] 5 MLJ 1 FC that once that threshold is crossed, the court not only may strike out but it should.

18. Alongside this general principle, O 18 R 7(1) ROC 2012, which requires that any allegation of fraud or forgery be pleaded with full and specific particulars. This goes to the heart of Manjula's claim Without particulars, the opposing party cannot know the precise case being made against them, and the court cannot assess whether a genuine cause of action exists. A party that pleads fraud in broad terms, without identifying who did what, how, and when, has not pleaded fraud at all.

19. Also, s 45(1) of the Evidence Act 1950 ("EA 1950") recognises that when a court must form an opinion on the genuineness of handwriting, the opinion of a person specially skilled in that field is a relevant fact. An allegation that a signature is forged requires, at a minimum, some evidentiary foundation that can be tested, and the proper vehicle for that foundation is expert evidence.

20. With these principles in mind, this Court turned to examine what Manjula's claim actually contained.

Part V: The Forgery Allegation — A Conclusion in Search of Facts

21. The cornerstone of Manjula's case was the allegation that the signature on the Will was not her father's. The SOC stated plainly that the signature was a forgery. Forgery strikes at the heart of a will where it renders the whole edifice of testamentary intention fraudulent. Courts have not been slow to find forgery where the evidence supports it. But the key phrase is where the evidence supports it.

22. In Manjula's case, there was no evidence. The allegation rested entirely upon the Plaintiff's own visual impression. It is what the SOC described as "dari penglihatan Plaintiff", or "from the Plaintiff's observation." That was all. There was no identification of who had forged the signature. There was no account of how the forgery was carried out, or when. There was no description of specific differences between the signature on the Will and Manikam's known or usual handwriting. No specimen signature was produced for comparison. There was no handwriting expert report that s 45(1) EA 1950 contemplates as the appropriate means of contesting the genuineness of a signature. In short, Manjula offered the Court a conclusion and asked it to accept that conclusion without a single building block of fact.

23. Against this bare assertion, the evidence on the other side was positive and uncontested. Sharmila produced a Sale and Purchase Agreement dated 4 July 1990 ("SPA"). The SPA bears Manikam's signature from decades earlier, which is consistent with that on the Will. The Will had been prepared by Rockwills, a company whose very business is estate planning, operating independently of the family and with no conceivable interest in producing a fraudulent document. It had been executed before two witnesses, each of whom would have been present at the moment of signing. None of this was answered. None of this was rebutted.

24. In Baskaran Krishna & Ors v Thai Haa Ling [2025] CLJU 3560 HC, a challenge to a grant of letters of administration was struck out for precisely the same deficiency where there was a complete absence of pleaded facts and particulars of fraud, with nothing to support the allegation beyond the plaintiffs' own assertions. The High Court there was unequivocal that such a claim does not give rise to a triable issue. The same logic applied with equal force here. The allegation of forgery, as pleaded, was not a cause of action. It was a wish dressed up as a pleading.

Part VI: The Incapacity Allegation — Speculation Without Proof

25. If the forgery allegation was Manjula's primary attack on the Will, her secondary position was that even if Manikam had physically signed the document, his mental state at the time was so deteriorated that he could not have understood what he was doing. The Will was executed in January 2022. Manjula pleaded that around the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, Manikam's health had declined and his memory had become very poor, such that he could not possibly have appreciated the effect of the document before him.

26. This too is, in principle, a recognised ground for challenging a will. The law has long required that a testator possess what is known as testamentary capacity. It is an understanding of the nature of the act of making a will, of the extent of the property being disposed of, and of the claims of those who might ordinarily expect to benefit. The foundational statement of this requirement appears in the English case of Banks v Goodfellow (1870) LR 5 QB 549, a decision that has been applied in numerous will disputes. More recently, in Aw Peck Luan & Anor v Kau Peck Guat [2025] MLJU 999 HC, I affirmed that the burden of proving lack of testamentary capacity lies squarely on the party challenging the will, and that such challenges require careful attention to the medical evidence and not impression, which tells the court what was happening in a person's mind at the moment they signed.

27. In Aw Peck Luan, I found such lack of capacity only after a meticulous examination of medical records documenting the testator's condition: the severity of the pain the deceased was experiencing, the high doses of Fentanyl and Abstral he received, and the physical deterioration apparent on the day the will was signed. The evidentiary threshold was on the balance of probabilities to be satisfied by the party who challenges the making of the will.

28. Manjula met none of it. She named no medical condition from which her father had been suffering. She described no specific symptoms. She identified no treating doctor, cited no hospital, and produced no records. There was neither any clinical note, referral letter nor prescription pleaded. Her allegation of mental deterioration was expressed in the same vague and generalised terms as everything else in her SOC. It said, in effect, that Manikam had not been well, and left the Court to infer the rest.

29. Meanwhile, Sharmila's uncontroverted evidence told a different story. In 2022, in the very year the Will was executed, Manikam appeared before a Commissioner for Oaths ("CFO") in Bandar Sri Permaisuri to affirm an official document. This is not something that can be done without the mental capacity to understand what one is doing. A man who lacked the capacity to comprehend the contents of a will would equally lack the capacity to appear before a CFO and affirm a legal document. The evidence pointed firmly and without contradiction to a man who retained his mental faculties at the material time.

30. Manjula's allegation of incapacity was a bare allegation. It was a belief without proof, that does not survive the threshold test for a sustainable claim.

Part VII: The Cloud of Suspicious Circumstances — And Why It Did Not Hold

31. The third leg of Manjula's challenge was more dispersed. She argued that the circumstances surrounding the Will were, taken together, suspicious. The appointment of Sharmila as executrix, the estrangement between Sharmila and the family, and the manner in which the Grant of Probate was obtained all pointed to something improper having occurred.

32. This argument, too, is one that courts have entertained in appropriate cases. The doctrine of suspicious circumstances recognises that probate may be refused where features of the transaction invite inquiry. The features that raise a genuine concern that the will does not represent the free and informed act of a capable testator. But the cases in which such concerns have been upheld have shared a common feature: the person propounding the will was also the person who stood to benefit from it. In Aw Peck Luan and in the Court of Appeal's decision in Tob Weng Keong & Anor v Tob Chee Hoong (2019) MLJU 1435 CA, the suspicious circumstance that carried weight was that the propounder and the primary beneficiary were one and the same person, creating an obvious incentive for manipulation.

33. That circumstance is entirely absent here. Sharmila is not a beneficiary. She receives nothing from Manikam's estate. She inherits no property, no money, no interest of any kind. She carries only the burden of administration, being responsible for giving effect to the testator's wishes. There is no personal gain that could logically motivate her to manipulate the document. She benefits from the Will's validity only in the sense that any executor benefits: the satisfaction, if that is the right word, of discharging a duty.

34. Manjula's characterisation of Sharmila as a foreign national added nothing to her case and was, in any event, factually inaccurate. Sharmila holds a Malaysian identity card. She is not a foreign national, as alleged in Para 18 SOC. The description was misleading, and its inclusion tells the Court something about the care, or lack of it, with which the pleadings were prepared.

35. As for the ex parte Grant of Probate, this, too, was presented as a suspicious circumstance, as though it were something unusual or clandestine. It is neither. An ex parte application for probate is the standard established procedure for obtaining a grant in uncontested circumstances. The High Court issued the Grant of Probate on 6 February 2025 after considering the application on its merits. The procedure followed was the procedure the law prescribes. There is nothing in it to invite suspicion.

Part VIII: The Ghost of an Earlier Will

36. Woven through Manjula's SOC was an intriguing suggestion that the January 2022 Will was not the first will Manikam had made, and that an earlier document existed that distributed the estate differently, including Chandru, and named Malarville, Manikam's sister, as executrix. Manikam was said to have spoken of this earlier will to Chandru, to Chandru's wife, and to Malarville herself. When the family attended the reading of the Will, Chandru had asked the solicitors about this earlier document. The solicitors did not deny that it existed. They simply declined to provide a copy.

37. This narrative has the texture of a story that evokes the impression of a hidden document, a suppressed truth, or a prior expression of testamentary intention that was overridden by something or someone. But an impression, however vivid, is not evidence. The allegation was pure hearsay: what Manikam was reported to have told various family members, with no documentary evidence to corroborate it.

38. No copy of the alleged earlier will was produced. No terms were pleaded. The solicitors who were said to hold it were not compelled, by any legal process, to disclose it, and Manjula took no steps to compel them before commencing this suit. If such a document truly existed and truly contained instructions so different from the January 2022 Will as to suggest that something improper had occurred, the obvious course was to pursue it through the proper legal channels before filing proceedings. Manjula did not do so.

39. There was, moreover, a further answer to this allegation: Para 1 of the Will expressly revoked all prior testamentary instruments. This is standard practice in every properly drafted will. Its presence in the January 2022 document does not raise suspicion; it simply reflects the drafting convention that a testator's latest expression of intention supersedes all earlier ones. The ghost of the earlier will, if it ever existed, had already been laid to rest by the testator himself.

Part IX: The Aspersions That Had No Place in Court

40. There were portions of Manjula's SOC that went beyond the merely inadequate and ventured into territory that the law regards as scandalous. At Paras 9 and 18 SOC, the Plaintiff pleaded that Manikam and Letchemy had, during their lifetimes, suspected that the children born to Sharmila during her marriage to Jayaseelan were not Jayaseelan's biological children. The implication, stated in plain terms, was that Sharmila had been unfaithful to her husband, and that the children she had brought into the world were not who they appeared to be.

41. No evidence was offered in support of this allegation. Not a shred. It was presented as an established fact, or at least as something the deceased had believed. It is on the basis of nothing more than the assertion of the person making the claim.

42. The law is clear on what is to be done with pleadings of this character. In Boey Oi Leng v Trans Resources Corporation [2002] 1 CLJ 405 HC, Low Hop Bing J (as he then was) defined "scandalous" material as that which is wholly unnecessary or irrelevant to the issues in dispute. The Court of Appeal expanded on this in Solai Realty v UOB [2013] 4 MLJ 545 CA, recognising that pleadings which cast improper aspersions on a party's moral character, such as imputations that go to their personal integrity without any evidentiary foundation, fall squarely within the category of the scandalous. The question of a woman's fidelity to her husband has no bearing on the validity of a will. The parentage of her children has no bearing on the validity of a will. These allegations were irrelevant to the case and damaging to the person against whom they were made. Their only discernible purpose was to embarrass and to wound.

43. That purpose is not one the courts will countenance. These allegations warranted striking out under O 18 R 19(1)(b) ROC 2012 on this ground alone.

Part X: A Name That Did Not Belong

44. Prayer (e) SOC sought an injunction restraining the Defendant from dealing with the assets of the estate of "Uthrarubaindran a/l Kuppusamy (No. K/P: 750801-10-5519/A3l63712)." This person does not exist anywhere in the facts of this case. The deceased in these proceedings was Manikam A/L Kalimuthu. Uthrarubaindran a/l Kuppusamy is an entirely different individual, connected to an entirely different matter a name and identity card number that appears to have been carried over, verbatim, from another file into this claim.

45. This error, taken in isolation, might be attributed to clerical carelessness. But it does not stand in isolation. It sits alongside bare allegations of forgery, devoid of particulars; allegations of incapacity, devoid of medical evidence; suspicious-circumstance arguments, devoid of foundation; and scandalous aspersions, devoid of support. Together, they paint a picture of proceedings that were not brought with the careful, considered preparation that litigation demands. They were brought in haste, or in grief, or in the service of someone else's agenda. The consequences of that were borne by Sharmila, who was forced to suspend her duties as executrix for the duration of the proceedings, leaving the trust properties without proper administration, their quit rent and assessment charges unpaid, and the very grandchildren the Will was designed to protect, including Manjula's own son, Divakar, left in a state of uncertainty.

Part XI: The Hand Behind the Curtain

46. This Court was satisfied, having considered all the evidence, that Chandru was the person who had been excluded from the Will. Chandru was the person who had been excluded from the Kooperasi nomination form. Chandru's children were the ones whose conduct had prompted a police report and the deterioration of relations with the deceased. Chandru was the eldest son, the one who might, in another family's story, have expected to inherit. But, instead, had been passed over, deliberately and consistently, by a father who had decided vide the Will.

47. Chandru was not a party to this Suit. But his presence was felt. The challenge to the Will served his interests, not Manjula's. Ironically, not even Manjula's son's interests, since the Will that Manjula sought to invalidate was the very instrument by which Divakar, her own child, would receive his inheritance.

48. The courts have long recognised that litigation can be used as an instrument of pressure. A party with no sustainable legal case can nonetheless impose costs, delay, and anxiety upon their adversary simply by commencing proceedings and forcing a response. This is precisely the mischief that the power to strike out is designed to prevent. As this Court observed in reliance upon Baskaran Krishna, courts should not condone litigation grounded in bare allegations and speculation. Allowing such a claim to proceed to a full trial would have rewarded the act of filing, regardless of what was filed. Conclusion: The Finale

49. The law that governs the striking out of pleadings requires a court to ask whether the claim is, on its face, obviously unsustainable. It is a high threshold, deliberately so. Courts do not lightly deny a party the right to a hearing.

50. But the threshold exists for a reason. When a claim is built not on facts but on conclusions, not on evidence but on suspicion, not on proper particulars but on aspersions when it names the wrong deceased person in its prayers, when its forgery allegation rests on nothing more than the plaintiff's own eyesight, when its incapacity allegation is unsupported by a single medical record that claim has not crossed the threshold the law requires. It is not a case waiting to be proven. It is a grievance in search of a case. This was such a claim. The Defendant's application in Enc. 8 was accordingly allowed with costs. Dated: 2 July 2026 Arziah binti Mohamed Apandi Judge Kuala Lumpur High Court NCvC 8 Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur Mr. M Manoharan Plaintiff Counsel: Messrs M Manoharan & Co. Kuala Lumpur Tel. No.: 03-2283 2388/012-2284955 Email: info@manoharanlaw.com Defendant Counsel: Ms. Pavitra Loganathan (together with her Ms. Gunasunthery Sivan) Messrs Pavitra & Co Selangor Tel. No.:012-219 2371 Email: messrspavitraco@gmail.com Cases referred: Bandar Builder Sdn Bhd & Ors v United Malayan Banking Corporation Bhd [1993] 3 MLJ 36 SC Serac Asia Sdn Bhd v Sepakat Insurance Brokers Sdn Bhd [2013] 5 MLJ 1 FC Baskaran Krishna & Ors v Thai Haa Ling [2025] CLJU 3560 HC Banks v Goodfellow (1870) LR 5 QB 549 Aw Peck Luan & Anor v Kau Peck Guat [2025] MLJU 999 HC Tob Weng Keong & Anor v Tob Chee Hoong (2019) MLJU 1435 CA Boey Oi Leng v Trans Resources Corporation [2002] 1 CLJ 405 HC Solai Realty v UOB [2013] 4 MLJ 545 CA Acts/Law referred: Order 18 R 7(1) of the Rules of Court 2012 Order 18 R 19(1)(b) Rules of Court 2012 Section 45(1) of the Evidence Act 1950