An appeal has been lodged against a Supreme Court decision ordering a former commanding officer of the Royal Bermuda Regiment to pay back almost $3 million in loans and interest to his mother-in-law.

Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Lamb and his wife, Ruby Lightbourne-Lamb, received $1,921,443 from Mrs Lightbourne-Lamb’s parents, Gwyneth and Willard Lightbourne, in four payments between 2003 and 2009.

The vast majority of the funds were to be invested in property.

Mr Lightbourne, who owned and ran the Brightside apartment complex in Flatts with his wife, died in January 2011. Since then, the two families have been in dispute over the payments.

Mr Lightbourne’s widow maintained that the loans were not absolved and that a single payment of more than $1.5 million — which came out of her and her husband’s joint account and represented their life savings — was never intended as a gift.

In a ruling handed down last July, Puisne Judge Shade Subair Williams agreed.

She noted that the couple had signed an agreement to pay back some of the money, and questioned why they had continued to make monthly payments after Mr Lightbourne had supposedly written them off.

Mr Lamb and Ms Lightbourne-Lamb are appealing the decision and have included about 25 grounds of appeal.

The grounds come under the categories corporate and personal.

They make the case that the judge failed to consider numerous matters in her judgment.

They claim that the judge failed to consider that the real source of the payment was the Gwen-Will Lightbourne Trust Fund and not the company, which would have constituted a misappropriation of company assets.

They claim that the judge failed to properly consider the various “discrepancies” in the evidence related to the corporate claim and could not be satisfied on the balance of probabilities that the claim had been proven.

They also claim that the judge failed to consider the authenticity of certain loan agreements.

On the payment of $1,556,443, the appellants said: “The learned judge was wrong when she found that it was ’the practice of the mother and the deceased to lend, not gift, the daughter with significant amounts of money’ in the face of the evidence that was made without any written loan agreement in place.”