The facts immediately relevant are these. On 31st December, 1929, one Annie Sibthorpe executed a will whereunder she left her property to her two sisters Louisa Sibthorpe and Emma Sarah Sibthorpe. Annie Sibthorpe died on 19th February, 1932. Lousia Sibthorpe made her last will on 15th July, 1948 and she died on 11th September, 1950. On 10th June, 1932, Emma Sarah Sibthorpe executed a will whereunder she nominated Lousia Sibthorpe and Nathaniel to be her executors. Emma Sarah Sibthorpe died on 17th December, 1932. Probate of all these three wills was obtained at various times in the High Court of Judicature in Eire. The petitioner Leslie Davison Miller holds a power of attorney from the executor of the will of Louisa. Nathaniel, one of the two executors under the will of Emma Sibthorpe took no interest in the matter and the residuary legatee of her estate is the Church of Ireland. Leslie Davison Miller holds a power-of-attorney from “the representative body of the Church of Ireland.” On the strength of these powers-of-attorney Mr. Miller has applied for Letters of Administration with the will annexed of the properties of Annie Sibthorpe, Emma Sarah Sibthorpe and Louisa Sibthorpe in this country.

Now, part of the property devised under the wills of these three individuals are some shares in the Buckingham & Carnatic Mills and also in the Imperial Bank. Between the dates of the death of the individuals and the date of the present application the dividends payable in respect of these shares were from time to time remitted abroad.

The first question I have to decide is whether on the dividends that were so remitted duty is payable by virtue of section 56 of the Court-fess Act (XIV of 1955). So far as is now material that section runs as follows:-

“The fee chargeable for the grant of probate or Letters of Administration shall comprise-a fee at the rate or rates prescribed in Article 6 of Schedule I, computed-

(b) where the application is made after the expiry of one year from such date, i.e., the date of the death of the testator, on the market value of the estate on the date of the application.”

It seems to me to be plain beyond dispute that ordinarily the estate of a person as on a certain date would, in the eye of law, be the original corpus plus all the accretions that have been lawfully made to it less everthing that has been lawfully taken away from it. Now, the dividends payable on the shares which the deceased individuals held in the Buckingham &38; Carnatic Mills and in the Imperial Bank would therefore naturally form accretions to the estate unless they have been lawfully subtracted from it. It is true that certain individuals in this country remitted the dividends abroad. But, so far as I can see, they had no legal authority to do so, since they were only intermeddlers with the estate, and in consequence those dividends must be considered to be accretions to the estate. The result follows that duty must be paid on them.

The learned Assistant Government Pleader cited a number of English cases before me but I shall refer to only two of them. The first is reported in Attorney-General v. New York Breweries Company 1. The head note gives an adequate summary of the case:

“Upon the death of a testator, resident and domiciled in America, shares and debentures in an English company, of which he was the registered holder in the books of the Company in London, passed by his will according to the law of his domicile to his executors in America. At their request the company registered them as the holders of two shares and a debenture in the place of the deceased, and paid to them the dividends and interest due upon the shares and debentures at the time of the testator’s death. The executors, to the knowledge of the company, had not obtained, and did not intend to obtain, probate of the will in England:

Held: That the company, by so dealing with the assets of the testator in England, constituted themselves executors de son tort, and we