A newly publicized will by an heiress to a Montana copper mining fortune leaves most of her $400 million estate to her family, while a will signed just weeks later left nothing to relatives.The childless Huguette Clark died in May at age 104 – a last breath of New York's Gilded Age that produced the Rockefellers, Astors and Vanderbilts.
Her relatives brought the new will to light on Monday: They filed court papers asking a Surrogate's Court judge to involve them in proceedings about how her money was spent – and by whom – while she was alive.
Clark's relatives accuse her co-executors, attorney Wallace Bock and accountant Irving Kamsler, of plundering her fortune. The two were among the few who for years had access to the reclusive Clark in her Manhattan hospital room. Clark had left her 42-room Manhattan home – the largest residence on Fifth Avenue – decades earlier, choosing to live undisturbed at the hospital.
A court-ordered accounting of the Paris-born heiress' finances as overseen by Bock and Kamsler in the last 15 years of her life is "a chilling report of the mishandling, misappropriation and mismanagement" of her assets, the relatives' lawyer, John R. Morken, wrote in papers filed Monday.
While Clark was confined to a hospital room, her spending amounted to about $1 million each month, Morken said, citing the figures.
Monday's filing, which was first reported by msnbc.com, included a will signed in March 2005, about six weeks before another will that Bock and Kamsler filed shortly after Clark's death.
Full Article and Source:
Huguette Clark, Montana Copper Heiress, Signed Two Conflicting Wills Before Death
See Also:
Huguette Clark Left $34mil to Nurse
The problem here is of course this will feed the lawyers...
ReplyDeleteFor decades at least, practical legal reforms have been proposed to lawmakers, AARP and others to reliably prevent such financial exploitation of individuals suffering debilitating infirmities at the time they execute wills, deeds, trusts, POAs and other important legal/financial documents. Please join me in inviting members of the media to learn about and report not only these proposals but also the difficulties of getting authorities to do anything that they should do to respond to what I experienced when my father was taken advantage in a Florida hospital while on a morphine drip and Do Not Resuscitate order that were started when cancer ruptured his stomach just hours before he died, as described by the doctor who started my father on the morphine drip in the sworn testimony that is reproduced online beginning at http://home.roadrunner.com/~tvfields/SteinmetzDepo/Frameset001.htm and that is summarized at http://home.roadrunner.com/~tvfields/SteinmetzDepo/Frameset000.htm.
ReplyDeleteThis ought to heat things up!
ReplyDeleteThis case is going to go on and on and on until the lawyers have eaten up the entire estate.
ReplyDelete