A former cider company boss who torched his mineral water tycoon brother’s car after being left less than him in their parents’ wills has been hit with an £875,000 court bill after suing and losing.
Alastair Bowerman, 57, went to court after being left a one-third share of the £230,000 cash his parents left in their wills.
His brother Ben Bowerman, 60, got cash and their parents’ shares in the 460-acre family farm on Dorset’s Isle of Purbeck, which includes a Grade I-listed medieval manor house and a lucrative mineral water spring.
Their parents, Jean and John Bowerman, originally made wills in 1988, splitting their cash between Alastair and third brother David – Ben was to be given the family farm business.
The farm is home to a natural mineral water spring exploited through a company which Ben runs, and at one point was the third biggest supplier of water cooler bottles in the country.
Their father’s estate was expected to be boosted by inheritance money from their grandfather – this would also be split to favour Alistair and David.
But Jean and John made new wills in 1999, handing Ben an equal share of all cash and their remaining business shares, having given him most of them a year earlier.
After John’s death in 2004 and Jean’s in 2012, the combined estates were worth just £230,000 – the inheritance from their grandfather had not materialised.
Alastair Bowerman outside the High Court during a legal dispute with his brothers over their parents’ wills
Ben Bowerman, who now runs the family farm and the mineral water business made possible by the spring on its land, was awarded costs of £777,000
The family’s land includes a Grade I-listed manor house at Godlingston Manor Farm near Swanage, Dorset
Alistair Bowerman also sued his brother David (pictured) who also benefitted from cash after their parents died in 2004 and 2012
Alistair, whose Dorset Cider company folded in 2005, told lawyers he ‘did not agree with the gift of the farm business’ to Ben and suspected a ‘conspiracy’.
In 2015 Alistair was convicted of arson and hit with a restraining order after ‘setting fire to Ben’s car’.
He later alleged Ben ‘had committed fraud… and corruption on a massive scale’ in an email to lawyers.
Last year he represented himself in a four-day trial at London’s High Court in which he sued his two brothers as executors of their parents’ wills and the professional administrator of Jean’s estate.
He said their father’s 1999 will was invalid because of lack of knowledge and approval, while his mother’s was subject to Ben’s undue influence.
But despite convincing Master Julia Clark that his father was too ill to properly understand what he was doing when he changed his will in 1999, Alistair lost his case because he brought it in 2023, a decade after his mum’s death and over 18 years after that of his father.
He has now been hit with Ben’s legal costs of more than £777,000 and those of his brother David and the administrator of Jean’s estate, who claimed around a further £100,000 between them.
The figure wipes Alastair’s inheritance many times over – the court was told that the ‘overall costs to be paid will exceed the sums in the estate’.
Alastair did not attend court for the costs hearing and was not represented.
