A Lottery winner who snatched £86,000 from her dead mum’s bank account has been ordered to pay the full amount back to her family.
After returning £56,000 Margaret MacDonald, 57, has been ordered to pay back the remaining £30,000 after being sued by three of her sisters.
They insisted her claim that she was acting on her mother’s orders by taking the cash was lies.
A sheriff has now ordered MacDonald to return the full amount to her family, reports the Daily Record.
MacDonald – whose husband Iain scooped a £500,000 share of a multi-million-pound lottery syndicate win in September 2009 – has been locked in a bitter legal wrangle with her sisters since their mum, Margaret Doonin, died of cancer five years ago.
Heartbreak: Margaret Doonin died of cancer five years ago.
She returned more than £56,000 but claimed she had been entitled to move £30,000 on the instruction of Margaret – despite being estranged from her mum and removed from her will.
A sheriff has now dismissed her version of events and ordered MacDonald, of Blantyre, Lanarkshire, to return every penny of the outstanding cash – plus thousands of pounds in interest accrued while the long-running feud rumbled through the courts.
A defiant MacDonald said “bitter rifts” had torn her once close-knit family apart and blamed her siblings for “disputing the wishes” of her dead mum.
Margaret died aged 85 just a few months after the MacDonalds’ lotto windfall,leaving behind eight children.
The pensioner’s late husband Frank had been a well-known local businessman and had owned the Doon Inn pub in Blantyre, a recycling company and a property firm before his death in 2008.
Just before Margaret’s death, she made payments of £10,000 to five of her kids but left out three, including MacDonald, who she had not spoken to for several months.
After her death, MacDonald claimed her mother had told her to split £30,000 evenly between her and the other siblings who had been left out, brother Francis and sister Catherine.
She removed £86,391.36 from the OAP’s Royal Bank of Scotland account in February 2010, promising to return the cash after she had been refunded for items she bought on behalf of her mum.
She later returned more than £56,000 but kept the almost £30,000 – sparking the legal action. MacDonald – a customer service adviser for HM Revenue and Customs – was sued by sisters Frances Hutcheson, 47, Patricia Cavanagh, 54, both of Blantyre, and Elizabeth Doonin, 63, who has emigrated to Canada.
Frances previously told a hearing her mum had “died of a broken heart”.
She said: “It is total and utter lies that Margaret McDonald received instruction from my mother to get the money for all her children.
“Margaret had lost her power of attorney and had been excluded from my mother’s will.
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