How is Property separation for a bigamous marriage???

HELP!!!

Me and my mother have just discovered that our father had a VALID previous marriage with another woman. He was already MARRIED when he wed my mother and he lied about it. My mother didn't know she was marrying a married man.

To avoid detection, my father falsified his age in the second marriage contract making himself 3 years younger. He is unable to produce a birth certificate to prove that he is indeed the age he claims in my mother's marriage contract (second marriage)

My mother has been deceived. They have an age difference of 15 years with my mother being 15 years younger than him.

What complicated matters is that my mother has several properties to her name. The many titles of the properties state her name with only my father as a "married to". The titles are not on "Spouses" but only "Married to" wherein my mother is the primary owner and my father just gave marital consent.

I would like to ask for legal advice on how my mother can keep the properties she worked so hard for and is technically under her name. Since they were never married to begin with, to whose favor do you think the court will award the properties?

Will my father's first family have any claim to my mother's properties? since they are the valid wife and children and my mother is not. Both the first family and the second family have children.

Thank you very much for any advice or enlightenment you could give.

when a title says x married y, it means they own it jointly. there is no 'primary owner'.

her proper remedy is to file for declaration of nullity of the marriage, but the question is whether she can prove that she paid for the properties through her own efforts.

Art. 148. In cases of cohabitation not falling under the preceding Article, only the properties acquired by both of the parties through their actual joint contribution of money, property, or industry shall be owned by them in common in proportion to their respective contributions. In the absence of proof to the contrary, their contributions and corresponding shares are presumed to be equal. The same rule and presumption shall apply to joint deposits of money and evidences of credit.

If one of the parties is validly married to another, his or her share in the co-ownership shall accrue to the absolute community or conjugal partnership existing in such valid marriage. If the party who acted in bad faith is not validly married to another, his or her shall be forfeited in the manner provided in the last paragraph of the preceding Article.

The foregoing rules on forfeiture shall likewise apply even if both parties are in bad faith.

Hello again attorney.

Might I ask a follow-up question to this thread that I started a while ago.

What If I were to buy some of the properties my mother owns? I am of legal age and can prove my income (I operate a successful business). After the TITLE has been transferred to MY NAME from my parents (they will both sign the deed of sale). Will the first family have any more claim to the property already under MY NAME after my parents sell it to me legally?

Would appreciate very much your response as it might influence my family's course of action.

but your father would have to also sign the deed of sale in order to transfer to you

Yes attorney assuming he did sign the deed of sale...

What claim does the first family still have? If any? The property is already under MY NAME and my father has affixed his signature of sale duly notarized.

then it will be considered valid until overturned by a court. the first family will have to prove it was fictitious.

Ah I see attorney.

That would be no problem since what we plan to do is not fictitious, but a transaction where I will really pay money.

But a concern of mine is... can the first family use this excuse? Since the first wife is the valid wife, my father and her have absolute community right? So did my father have, in the first place, the authority to sell the property to me? or to anyone else for that matter? Since his first wife would not affix HER marital consent to the transaction?

That would of course be very weird, since in the title it says my father is married to MY mother. Does a sale of property where my mother and my father sign stand valid when later the first wife says my father couldn't sell it in the first place because HIS share is also HER share and she did not consent to the sale?

But how on earth can you have one man, with two marital consents by two women claiming to be his wives? Does the law provide that properties sold by bigamous marriages stand valid in terms of authority to sell? After all, the property did not disappear it just turned into X number of millions which my father and mother will have in their bank accounts. Those X number of millions would now be the new property his first family will chase and not the property which was sold?

This is the gray area I could not find anywhere on the civil code, and as of now no attorney I have asked had been able to tell me. Hopefully you can enlighten me on this.

there is nothing you can do to stop them from filing a case, if they really wanted to, but if you will really pay for the property then you have a meritorious defense, not to mention many years of litigation to keep using the property.