March 2020

Decision of the Athens Court of Appeal on the Authenticity of a Will

By its decision no. 1350/2020, the Athens Court of Appeal, issued after the case was returned for retrial, following the issuance of the decision no. 594/2016 of the Third Chamber of the Supreme Court, after having previously, by its decision no. 3070/2018 non-final decision, it ordered the performance of a graphological expert opinion to judge the authenticity or otherwise of the contested will with which our client had been honored, it ruled that the said will is authentic, despite a total of six (6) conflicting graphological opinions and an equal number of these evaluation reports - graphological observations. Specifically, of the total of six (6) graphological reports submitted to the Court, four (4) held that the will at issue is a fake - including the court-ordered expert opinion - while the other two (2) held that it is genuine. The Court, therefore, came to the final judgment that the will is genuine because, having considered the above reports in their entirety, as well as all of the other evidence, it accepted our contention, essential to the outcome of the case, that the common thread of the four (4) handwriting reports that found the will to be a forgery, is that they did not take into account at all the health and age of the testatrix (unlike the other two), a fact that is indispensable for the proper assessment of the authenticity or otherwise of a will, since, as is well known, they are factors that have a decisive influence on human writing. He also stated that a supporting element in the judgment on the authenticity of the will in question was our essential contention that although the four (4) scribal reports that found the will to be forged coincide in their conclusion (i.e. that it is a forgery), they nevertheless differ significantly in the individual judgments by which they reached that conclusion, which significantly reduces their credibility. In the above circumstances, therefore, the Court held that the contested will is genuine and dismissed the opposing parties' claim.