SONATON PAL Vs. GALSTAUN

JUDGEMENT

(1.) Their Lordships do not require to hear counsel for the first respondent, who alone appears.

(2.) This is an action brought by the first respondent, the plaintiff, to enforce against the estate of one, Sookias deceased, an equitable mortgage by deposit of deeds accompanied by a letter or memorandum explaining the deposit. The contesting defendant, who is the present appellant, was a judgment creditor of the estate of the deceased, and interested, therefore, in disputing the validity of this mortgage, which, as the accounts have now been agreed, would, if valid, exhaust or nearly exhaust the whole property. His case was that there was no such equitable mortgage; that there was no such deposit of deeds on the date mentioned, if ever, and that, at any rate, it was not a deposit to secure a debt; if it was a deposit at all, it was for other purposes; but in substance he denied that there had ever been a deposit and he said that the alleged letter accompanying the deposit was a forgery. The deposit was alleged to have taken place in May, 1914, probably on the 22nd, and the letter, which followed, was dated June 30, It is to this effect: "J.C. Galstaun, Esquire," then his address is given. Dear Sir, I handed over the title deeds of my Gopechur property to you on May 22, 1914, with a view to create a security for the debts that I owed you and for farther advances and acceptances on my account. As evidence thereof I give you this letter, as desired by you.

(3.) And then there follows a list of the documents, and it purports to be signed by Sookias. The plaintiff and his manager both deposed to the fact of the deposit and to the correctness and genuineness of the signature by Sookias, and their evidence was supported by a brother of Sookias. Nobody was called to say that the signature was not the signature of Sookias, except one man who disputed the genuineness of a number of signatures by Sookias which were found by both Courts to be genuine, and therefore his evidence was not of much importance. The Subordinate Judge, however, found that there had been no deposit and that the letter was a forgery, basing his judgment upon certain correspondence which had passed between the plaintiff" and Sookias, chiefly letters written by Sookias which, in his view, did not look like there being an equitable mortgage; upon the fact that the handwriting was laboured in the way that an imitation would be laboured and that there were certain grammatical faults in the letter as produced; upon the motive which the plaintiff would have, having been extremely fond of the Sookias family, to preserve the property of the Sookias family for the family from their creditors, and upon various small grounds of suspicion.