Tyre tycoon’s brain injury has cost us a share of his millions, say his children

The two eldest children of a tyre empire tycoon worth £55 million have claimed their father’s ailing health before his death cost them a fair share of their inheritance.

Reg Bond, who died in March 2021, aged 77, left the majority of his remaining fortune to his two youngest sons. The two elder siblings are now fighting in court over the validity of his final will.

Their father turned £350 into a multimillion-pound fortune based on a tyre business before turning his hand to racehorses – producing a string of winners.

He had divided the majority of his fortune between his four children in 2017, but a final will, made in 2019, handed nearly all of the remaining £12.3 million to sons Charlie, 43, and Graham, 52, leaving Mike, 53, and Lindsay, 55, with just £325,000 each.

Mike and Lindsay Bond claim their father’s last will was invalid because he was too ill to understand what he was signing.

Ms Bond, who described herself as a “daddy’s girl” in court, said she and her brother Mike were “dumbfounded” when they found out the contents of the will.

They claim there was a plan to keep it a “secret” from them and said the circumstances surrounding the making of the will were “highly suspicious”.

But their younger brothers are fighting the claim, insisting their father’s mind was fine and that doctors’ records prove it.

They claim there was a rift between their father and Ms Bond in his final months, accusing their sister of being “penny pinching” and “undermining Reg’s independence”.

Bond turned misfortune on its head after he was blinded in one eye by a shard of flying metal, aged 22, whilst working as a mechanic, the High Court heard.

He used his £350 compensation payout to set himself up in a car parts business, alongside his father, beginning from a small garage in Pocklington, east Yorkshire, in the 1960s.

That business developed into Bond International Tyres. He later became a successful racehorse owner and breeder, realising a childhood dream by buying his first horse, Bond Boy, in 2002, which went on to win the Steward’s Cup.

In 2010 he was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and his wife, Betty, died in 2015.

The court heard Bond began estate planning in 2017, handing over shares worth £43.45 million in family company R&RC Bond Wholesale Ltd equally to his four children.

The gift amounted to 80 per cent of Mr Bond’s share in the company, and in 2017 he made a will dividing most of the rest of his fortune, amounting to £12.3 million, equally between the children, while Charlie was given the horses.

But in 2019, two years before his death, he made a final will, handing his remaining £11 million share in the company to Charlie and Greg alone.

The remaining £1.3 million, including the horses, was divided equally, leaving Mike and Lindsay with inheritances worth about £325,000 each and their younger brothers £5.825 million each.

Penelope Reed KC argued that Bond “lacked testamentary capacity” when he made his last will in November 2019, highlighting the fact he had been suffering from a brain tumour since 2010.

The elder siblings want the court to overrule the 2019 will and reinstate the previous one, claiming that his last determination is “invalid for want of knowledge and approval”.

Ms Reed said Bond suffered from a fall in his garden in 2014, which led to pneumonia and other serious complications, leaving him needing “full-time care”.

“Reg was vulnerable and reliant on his carers,” she told the hearing.

‘Dumbfounded’ by second will

“There is a real suspicion that what ended up in the final will did not represent his testamentary wishes. There’s some considerable doubt about how well the will summary was gone through with Reg.”

She added: “After Reg’s death, Mike and Lindsay were ‘dumbfounded’ to discover, on April 7 2021, the existence of the purported will.”

But Clare Stanley KC told the judge that Bond’s health was improving at the time before the will was signed, to the extent of wanting to get behind the wheel of a new Bentley he had bought.

She said that “evidence of progress in his physical health” was proved by a series of videos shown to the court of Bond in the time leading up to the making of the will, showing him doing squats and other physical exercises in a gym.

She said: “The documentary evidence suggests he knew he was signing a will and he knew what was in it.”

She added: “Far from excluding Mike and Lindsay, Reg made extraordinarily generous gifts to them, then acted in a rational and business-like fashion in relation to the last 20 per cent of the business he had built, deciding to give this in its entirety to his two children who were remaining in the business.”

The trial, set to last about three weeks, continues.