An indie band member and the grandson of Marianne Faithfull, the Sixties singer, is embroiled in a £400,000 family legal row over an estate and delays in burying a body.
Oscar Dunbar is the frontman of Khartoum, a band that formed in 2017 and is named after the decapitated racehorse in the film The Godfather.
The 32-year-old also has a claim to minor rock royalty as the grandson of Faithfull, who had a highly publicised four-year romance with Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.
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The crux of the row relates to an argument between Dunbar’s mother, Carole Jahme, 61, and his aunt, Patricia Tonge, 72, after the death of their mother, Dorothy Jahme, three years ago at the age of 97. She left an estate worth £400,000 that mainly consisted of her home in Axminster, Devon.
Three years later, the estate — which is meant to be divided between the daughters and their children — has yet to be distributed because Jahme and Tonge cannot agree over its management.
A High Court judge has been told that Jahme bears an “irrational hostility” towards her sister based on a childhood grudge. Tonge has successfully applied to the court for her sister to be removed as an executor of their mother’s will. Dunbar, who the court heard had taken a “back seat” throughout the dispute, was also removed from his role as a co-executor.
A former trapeze artist and acrobat, Jahme — who was Faithfull’s daughter-in-law through her marriage to Faithfull’s son, Nicholas Dunbar, a journalist — has also worked as a dancer, actress, television producer and science fiction writer.
The court heard that Carole Jahme, Dunbar’s mother, had an “irrational hostility” towards her sister
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Dunbar collaborated with Faithfull, who died in January, on her song Love Is, which was released posthumously on the album Burning Moonlight.
In court, Nathan Wells, Tonge’s barrister, said Jahme had recently displayed “irrational hostility” by raising unfounded accusations of childhood cruelty, accusing her of tying a plastic bag around her head when they were children. He said Tonge denied this.
Wells said there had been chronic delays in their mother’s burial owing to Jahme’s insistence that doctors must change her death certificate.
“Carole insisted that the death certificate should give the cause of death as Covid-19 and not pneumonia and dementia, and said the death certificate should be changed,” he said.
Patricia Tonge denied accusations of childhood cruelty, the High Court heard
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Wells said there had been issues with transactions from their mother’s bank account at a time when Jahme had power of attorney over her affairs, and that Jahme and Dunbar had “stepped away from the administration of the estate with no suggestion that they will re-engage”.
The barrister accepted in court that there was “no suggestion” that Dunbar was involved in any possible mismanagement of his grandmother’s bank account, but he said that there was “real concern” over his “sustained inactivity” as an executor of the estate.
Judge Katherine McQuail agreed that there were grounds for stripping the executor roles from Jahme and Dunbar, although she stressed it was not her role “to find facts or resolve disputes and wrongdoing”.
The judge noted that Dunbar had not contested the application to remove him from the role of executor. However, referring to his mother, she said: “One can deduce from all this that she is not able fairly and conscientiously to carry out the administration of this estate in a proper manner.”
A lawyer will replace Jahme and Dunbar as executors of the estate.