Maria Assunta was the wife of an Italian property tycoon and she had inherited her fortune from her husband after he died. Her wealth included stock investments and a large portfolio of land and properties in Rome, Milan and Calabria. But for all her millions – which her lawyers finally valued at USD13 million – she was lonely in her old age. Being childless, she lived alone, looked after by only her nurse, Stefania.

Less than four years ago, Assunta picked up a black stray cat from the streets of Rome and started caring for it. Here, at last, was an opportunity for her to fill up her loneliness. Assunta really doted on the cat.

But she knew that she was already old and frail. When her health began to fail two years ago, Assunta began to seek out a way for her beloved Tommaso (that’s the cat’s name) to be properly cared for after her death.

According to one of her lawyers, Anna Orecchioni, Assunta who died two weeks ago had become very fond towards the nurse who assisted her. “We are convinced that Stefania is the right person to carry out the old lady’s wishes. Stefania loves animals just like the woman she devoted herself to right up until the end.”

The lawyers said that Assunta left the fortune to Tommaso in a will she wrote and deposited with them in their Rome office in October 2009. They explained that under Italian law the cat was not entitled to inherit the money directly and as such, the will asked for the money to be given to a “worthy animal association, if one could be found”.

She added: “We had requests from several organizations but we didn’t find any that we thought suitable.” As they were unable to find a satisfactory association to look after Tommaso, Assunta then decided to leave all her money to the cat through her nurse, Stefania, who had cared for the old lady until her dying day.

Stefania told the newspapers that she had no idea of the woman’s incredible wealth. “The old lady suffered from loneliness,” the nurse said. “She looked after that cat more than you’d look after a son. I promised her that I would look after the cat when she was no longer around. She wanted to be sure that Tommaso would be loved and cuddled. But I never imagined that she had this sort of wealth. She was very discreet and quiet. I knew very little of her private life. She only told me that she had suffered a lot from loneliness.”

The nurse now lives with Tommaso and another cat in an undisclosed address to avoid con artists and potential kidnappers.

Tommaso is placed third on a list of wealthy pets behind Kalu the chimp, whose owner left him USD80 million dollars, and Gunther IV, a German shepherd dog who inherited $372 million dollars from his father,  Gunther III,  the beloved companion of an eccentric German countess. Real estate magnate Leona Helmsley famously left USD12 million to her little dog Trouble, although her human descendents contested, and Trouble’s pot was cut to USD2 million.

“It’s absolutely amazing,” a relieved Mrs Nilson said.

The Te Kauwhata couple had been trying to prove their identity and that of their dead son so they could access the money the 17-year-old had saved through the National Bank KiwiSaver Scheme.

To have the money, about $1500, released the couple were required to send a statutory declaration because their son did not have will.

However the Nilsons spent months trying to prove their identity, sending birth and death certificates for Shaun, their driver’s licences, passports, a verified marriage certificate and finally the declaration.

All the while they had been struggling to come to terms with their only son’s death.

Shaun was killed when he was a passenger in a car that crashed into a powerpole and tree in Hamilton’s Heaphy Tce on May 28.

The driver, Levi Elliott, who was then 16, was sentenced to three years’ jail for manslaughter in the High Court at Hamilton on Thursday.

“For me it’s only $1000 or $1500, it’s no real biggie,” Mrs Nilsonsaid.

“But if I was a widow and it was major and I was an older lady, I’d have given up.”

She said the fund was almost put in the “too hard basket” because of everything else they were trying to deal with after Shaun’s death.

As well as carrying on for their surviving child, 5-year-old daughter Laura, the Nilsons were struggling to sort out finances when Mrs Nilson, a self-employed swim coach, stopped working after the crash.

A spokesman for KiwiSaver provider OnePath said it was pleased to have resolved the situation for the family.

“It must have been very frustrating for them in terms of the delay considering their circumstances.”

He said that by law the trustee needed the statutory declaration to finalise the estate requirements which included the age of the dead person, the value of the investment, whether they left a will and who was administering that estate.

“In this instance there was a confusion in the documentation between who the funds were going to be released to since we were dealing with a solicitor at the time.”

The spokesman said that without a will the provider was responsible for ensuring it was releasing the funds to the right person and on this occasion it took longer than usual.

“But the most important thing is we were able to process this as soon as we received the correct and completed statutory declaration and that finalised our deceased estate requirements.”

A Financial Markets Authority spokesman said people having trouble getting KiwiSaver funds released early could complain about the process or length of time it took to Financial Services Complaints Ltd, a disputes resolution service, or to the authority itself.

At the centre of this legal dispute in Muar, Johor, was whether a signed marriage certificate was valid or not. The High Court there said that the document was invalid because of a questionable signature. And because of that, there were repercussions.

But the real moral of this story is that you don’t have to be a millionaire before you get your Will written.

What happened was that this woman, Kuan Siew Yen, had filed a claim to the estate of Tan Chin Shing at the High Court. Tan was 43 years old when he died in 2005 without having written a Will, and Kuan had wanted to prevent his elder brother from administering the estate of the deceased.

She claimed to have been married to the deceased and had submitted a marriage certificate purportedly issued through an assistant registrar at the Muar Chinese Chambers of Commerce.

However, the judge hearing the civil suit rejected Kuan’s application as the marriage was false. According to the judge, the marriage could not be legal as the signature of the assistant registrar differed on the marriage certificate and Kuan was unable to produce her two witnesses to her marriage.

The judge also allowed Tan’s elder brother’s counter suit to declare Kuan as not being the deceased’s legal wife and thus, could not stake a claim to the estate.

The news report as it appeared in The Star newspaper appears below.

From what I’ve been reading, there are cases in the last few years where facebook accounts of people who have died are hijacked by unknown spammers and the information therein abused. It’s a growing concern; a concern which people in the United Kingdom – and elsewhere – are addressing in quite a novel fashion.

Just today, I heard that in the United Kingdom, a growing number of people there are asking their lawyers or Will consultants to include their personal passwords in their Wills so that their families can access and save their personal data kept on Internet sites after they die.

Goldsmiths, University of London, which is a public research university in the UK, revealed in a survey that one in 10 people in the United Kingdom are leaving this information in their Will. And the numbers are catching on.

The study, carried out on behalf of cloud computing company Rackspace, found that more than a quarter of people in the country have hundreds of pounds worth of music and films stored online that they wish to pass on to their loved ones.

It’s not only limited to music or movies. People are also leaving their passwords to facebook, Flickr and personal blogs so that their personal data can be archived and not abused.

This has become so widespread until people now want their digital identities to be controlled after they are gone. They also want their families to have access to personal data which are now more commonly being stored in the cloud, rather than in a physical album at home.

Solicitor Matthew Strain told Sky News: “With more photos, books, music and so on being stored online and in digital format, the question of what happens to these when people are gone becomes more important every day. We have started to advise clients on digital inheritance as it is something people should be thinking and doing something about as part of the provisions in their Will.”

incidentally, that was the year that Rockwills was established. At that time, I was still with Ban Hin Lee Bank (or to use their more stylised name, BHL Bank). It was a few years after the  bank had been listed publicly on the Bursa Malaysia and it wanted to pursue new approaches to modern banking. Financial services had been identified as the services of the future so the bank plunged headlong into offering investment services and will-writing services.

For the will-writing services, the bank tied up with a new start-up company named Rockwills Corporation Sdn Bhd. Its chairman then, and still the chairman today, is Johari Low.

Rockwills came to the bank, gave its presentation to selected head office staff, and announced the collaboration where the bank’s branches would be at the front line to market will-writing services to their customers.

As I sat at the back of the room absorbing in all the information, I never realised that soon, I would be so closely associated with them. For starters, the job was given to my unit (sort of like a little department in the bank’s head office) to prepare the operations manual for this service.

For several weeks, my staff and I poured over Rockwills’ own operations manual, we talked and discussed matters and finally came out with the bank’s operations manual for the branches. It was during this process that I got to realise how much a Will can help people in need of services to unlock their loved ones’ estate after they had departed.

Of course, preparing the operations manual wasn’t a one-off activity for my unit. By its very nature, bank operations must change to accommodate the changing environment. So as the branches came back to us with problems and questions on the will-writing service, we had to go back to Rockwills for solutions and incorporate them into our own procedures. Personally, it was a good learning process for me.

But I never realised then how eventually, my understanding and believe in this service would lead me to become a will-writer myself.

In 2000, I took the step to immerse myself fully into it and approached Rockwills as one of their will-writers. I’m glad that I did because my conviction still holds true: that there are many people who really need this service and I should be doing this to help as many of them as possible, in my own way. It was never solely about money in the first place, and it is still never solely about money now.

So right now, when people ask me how long I have been in this will-writing business, I can confidently tell them that my association with Rockwills goes back to 1995. This year is 2011, which means that it has been 16 long years of which I have been writing Wills for people for 11 years.

Basically, there are three lessons to learn from this classic example of intestacy, that is, a situation where someone dies without a Will (or Wasiat in the case of a Muslim).

First, let me say that the deceased was a very wealthy man. When Syed Kechik died, he left an estate worth well over RM400 million. His heirs were his wife from a second marriage (his first marriage had ended in a divorce), a son from his first marriage and two daughters from his second marriage. However, without a Wasiat in which he could have appointed someone to be the Executor of his estate and with the estate now frozen until an Administrator can be appointed, none of the heirs are able to benefit from the estate. This is all too common, and it affects both Muslims and non-Muslims.

Secondly, it is very surprising that an intelligent man like Syed Kechik, who had been creating, growing and protecting his wealth all his life, could have missed out on that very important final aspect of wealth management, which is how his assets should be distributed ultimately. There is little point in being wealthy when at the end of the day, you subject your heirs to a protracted court battle. The longer the legal tussle, the more the deceased has put the worth of his estate at risk.

And thirdly, how can a Muslim avoid all these battles, arguments and animosity in the family? I’ve already mentioned the use of the Wasiat to appoint an Executor who can carry out the distribution of the residuary estate according to the complex Faraid equation (once the Probate is granted). Another helpful way is for the husband and wife to draw up a Declarasi Harta Sepencarian (a declaration of matrimonial property). The concept is very simple: if a wife can prove that she has helped her husband to prosper, she can claim up to half of his assets that were accummulated during their wedded years together.

Without these two instruments – the Wasiat and the Declarasi Harta Sepencarian – in many cases family harmony can threaten to break down totally when heirs line up against one another. The Syed Kechik case is a typical example.

Syed Kechik

When he died on 10 April 2009, his multi-million ringgit estate – which included Syed Kechik Holdings Sdn Bhd – became the subject of a complicated family feud between Syed Gamal (his son from his first marriage) and Syed Kechik’s second family (comprising daughters Sharifah Zarah and Sharifah Munira and wife Sofiah Moo Abdullah). The two daughters are directors of Syed Kechik Holdings. This is a summary of the long legal battle within the family, so typical when families are rich beyond comparison and the patriarch dies with incomplete or without proper estate planning.

The initial inkling of the legal feud surfaced in September 2009 when Sofia and her two daughters first filed an application for a Letter of Adminstration. Almost immediately, Syed Gamal obtained an ex-parte injunction at the Syariah Court to stop his 44 per cent stake in the company from being sold or liquidated. Two months later, the Syariah Appeal Court affirmed the decision after dismissing an appeal from Sharifah Zarah and Sharifah Munira.

The two sisters then brought the case to the Civil High Court by way of an originating summons. In the summons, they sought a declaration that Syed Gamal, as a beneficiary of Syed Kechik’s estate, had no rights or interests in the company’s assets until the completion of the administration and distribution of the estate. They also wanted an order to prevent their half-brother, his servants, agents and representative or anyone acting on his behalf from accessing and interfering with the assets, records, accounts and affairs of the company, including interfering in the execution of the duties and powers of Sharifah Zarah and Sharifah Munira as the directors of the company and all other corporate matters including transfer and disposal of the company’s shares.

In January 2010, the sisters obtained an interim injunction to prevent Syed Gamal from interfering in the company’s affairs pending the disposal of the originating summons at the Civil High Court. The Judicial Commissioner, Anantham Kasinather, who granted their application for an injunction, also ruled that the Syariah Court had no jurisdiction over the company on account of it being a corporate entity.

Then in April, Syed Gamal filed an application saying that as he was his father’s only son with Zainab@ Eshah Abdullah (Syed Kechik’s first wife), he was the heir and legitimate son, which entitled him to be a joint administrator of his father’s estate. He asked for a caveat that would restrain his stepmother and stepsisters from managing the estate without first consulting him.

At the caveat hearing in June, the lawyer for the sisters and their mother, N Vijay Kumar, told the court that Syed Gamal was not fit to administer the estate as he had “total disregard” of the civil law. Interesting, the newspaper quoted the lawyer as saying: “He thinks the Syariah Court supercedes the civil law,” adding that despite the injunction filed against him, Syed Gamal was persistent with his case at the Syariah Court. “If this is his behaviour, then he cannot administer the estate by law. He has demonstrated that he is not fit (to be an administrator),” Vijay Kumar added.

Whether or not the High Court judge accepted this argument, I don’t know but he decided in July that the RM400 million estate should be jointly administered by Syed Kechik’s three children and second wife. Judicial Commissioner Lee Swee Seng said he hoped the decision would enable the family to cooperate with one another but if there was still no consensus, they could come back to court.

Lee’s decision made at 8.15pm was filled with advice that left everyone in court listening in complete silence. He said in whatever situation, the parties involved should think of what the late Syed Kechik would like to see if he was still alive. He had worked hard to give his children a comfortable life and would not like to see the family torn apart.

Lee said the wealth acquired by Syed Kechik throughout his life was not only enough for his children but his grandchildren too. In his judgment, Lee also advised that the excess from the estate be donated to charity, while Syed Gamal and his family members from Syed Kechik’s second wife could begin the peace process by forgetting about the dispute.

In any event, the ladies then appealed against the High Court’s decision to make Syed Gamal a co-administrator. However, the three-man Court of Appeal panel, led by Justice Low Hop Bing ruled that the High Court had correctly given due regard to Syed Gamal’s right to be a co-administrator.

He said it was the court’s view that acrimony between Syed Gamal and his stepmother and half-sisters was not a good ground to exclude the former from being co-administrator of his father’s estate. Low said allegations made by Sofiah and her daughters that Syed Gamal lacked knowledge of the father’s business and that he (Syed Gamal) failed in a T-shirt business were not valid grounds to remove his right to be considered for appointment as co-admininstrator.

“Success and failure in life, business or any other activity is purely a matter of subjective judgment. Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts,” he said. The panel, which also comprised Court of Appeal judge Datuk Wira Abu Samah Nordin and High Court judge Datuk Azahar Mohamed, unanimously dismissed the appeal. “In our view, Section 30 of the Probate and Administration Act 1959 provide for the entitlement of all persons who are interested in the estate to be appointed administrators of deceased’s estate. We are unable to identify any error on the part of the Judicial Commissioner in appointing all appellants (Sofiah, Sharifah Zarah and Sharifah Munira) and respondent (Syed Gamal) as co-administrators of the deceased estate,” Low said.

And today, after the case finally reached the Federal Court, the country’s highest court affirmed the decision that the estate be jointly administered by all four relevant parties in the case. It was to be Syed Kechik’s second family’s final bid to stop Syed Gamal from claiming part control of the estate.

A three-man panel led by Chief Judge of Sabah and Sarawak Richard Malanjum unanimously dismissed Sofiah and the two daughters’ leave application to revise the Court of Appeal’s refusal of their appeal against the High Court ruling. The panel, which also comprised Federal Court judges Zulkefli Ahmad Makinudin and Md Raus Sharif, made the decision after hearing submissions from lawyers representing the four of them.

But is this the end of the story? For sure, the legal battles have been exhausted. The tussle had gone from the High Court up till the Federal Court. What’s left now is for the co-administrators to work together to realise the distribution of Syed Kechik’s estate. Now, considering the animosity between the two parties, this may prove to be even more challenging that the court battles. Can they ever work together to bring the company to greater heights? I think only time will tell.

The report quoted the Deputy Finance Minister, Dr Awang Adek Hussein, as saying that the owners and inheritors of the monies might not be aware of the existence of the funds.

He suggested that they could make enquiries at the nearest Bank Negara branch in order to submit a claim.

“If the monies are not claimed within the stipulated period, the government may borrow it for development purposes for the benefit of the people,” he said.

I should also add that if you have a dormant bank account that hasn’t been used for quite a while, it is prudent to go ask the bank about its status. The odd RM10 or RM20 may not be of much value today but it is still your money.

Any old savings passbook should immediately alert you to this account. It may be lying underneath a stack of documents in a seldom opened drawer, or anywhere else in the house. Or maybe even in a safe deposit box at a bank. Wherever you find it, if there is indeed such an account, the bank should assist you to reclaim it from the Treasury.

But just be warned that it may be several months before you can get back your money.

Therefore, I was a little surprised to read that according to Unbiased.co.uk in England, about one out of every 34 people that they surveyed in September indicated that they were thinking of leaving their assets to their pets. That extrapolated out to about 1.4 million people in a country of about 49 million.

Unbiased’s survey results indicated: about 28.8 million people would like their assets to go to their children; 25.7 million would like their spouse or partner to inherit their assets; and 8.8 million would like to see their assets go to another relative.

After this, the survey results became less predictable: about 4.4 million people preferred to give to a specific charity, 3.1 million think about giving their assets to a friend, 1.4 million to go to a pet, one million people planned to give to their church, 0.5 million people would give to a secret lover, 0.4 million to the local community, 0.3 million people said to the government and 0.2 million said they wouldn’t mind giving to a total stranger.

But while over nine out of 10 people (92 percent) have a clear idea of how they’d want to distribute their money when they die, an estimated 30 million people currently are without a Will in the United Kingdom, meaning their best intentions may not come to fruition.

The survey is part of Unbiased’s Write a Will Week, highlighting the importance of having an up-to-date Will in place. Dying intestate means leaving the decision to the government to decide the order of who gets what from your estate and if no one comes forward then the government will take the lot.

Karen Barrett, chief executive of Unbiased, said: “Family structures are constantly evolving, less people are getting married, and an increasing number of people wish to leave money to charities or friends, therefore it has never been more important to clearly state your wishes in a Will.”

Beyond preserving capital and ensuring that wealth gets distributed fairly, estate planning has evolved to cover more complex needs over the years. In his presentation, Estate Planning for Multi-Millionaires, at Rockwills International Sdn Bhd’s first estate planning conference yesterday, its chairman Johari Low said estate planning has now evolved to cover areas such as elderly care, maintaining harmony within the family, incentivisation and succession planning.

On how incentivisation works in estate planning, Low explained: “Some millionaires want their kids to work and strive for success, even though they will be inheriting millions. One way is incentivisation. You can peg income distribution to the condition that they have to get employed. The amount distributed is pegged to how much they earn. So, the harder they work, the higher the distribution of their income.”

Low noted that while the need for wills is acknowledged, people have a tendency to procrastinate. “The estate-planning industry in Malaysia is still very far behind, compared to the insurance and unit trust industries. People don’t do wills as much as they should. High-net-worth individuals (HNWI), especially, think they are invulnerable, and that unfortunate things won’t happen to them,” he said. In Malaysia, HWNI is defined as persons who have investible funds of RM3 million and above.

Driven by their changing lifestyle (especially the younger generation), longer lifespan, higher divorce rates (which require more plans for the family), clients’ increasingly more complex estate planning needs are altering the role of estate planners. “It’s no longer just about giving armchair advice to instruction-taking clients. It’s no longer a case of one-size-fits all. You have to tailor-make your plan to one client,” Low said. “A lot of multi-millionaires don’t know what they want. You need the skill to prompt them and dig it out of them. You need skills to reason out and find a solution that matches their objectives.”

Calling estate planning “the last leg of financial planning”, Low reckoned that financial planners need to consider a few factors when structuring a plan for their wealthy clients. “Find out who your clients’ dependants are, whether their spouses get along with their mothers-in-law and whether their children get along with each other,” he said, adding that planners need to know the client’s financial situation and their character traits. “Are they spendthrifts, or are they careful or conservative?”

In terms of presentation of the plan, estate planners can no longer expect to satisfy clients with a note that is filled with legal jargon, said Low. “HNWI are more demanding. They don’t take your word for it. They want to understand what you’re proposing.”

Going forward, he said, estate planners will play more non-financial roles. “Increasingly, overseas, there are now more moves for estate planners to be mediators,” he noted. “Lots of families have common issues. Multi-millionaires are also concerned about whether their child is marrying a gold digger, squandering all the millions away or is a spendthrift.”
In terms of regulation, laws covering disputes and conflicts of interest need to be clarified, he said. “Rather than going to court all the time, there’s a need for the law to be reviewed, and a need for the process to be more efficient. Now, it’s quite fragmented, where different states have different processes.”