Imagine being entitled to an inheritance worth about $150 million but you can’t touch it for over a decade because the family has yet to go about finding all the assets that will be shared among the beneficiaries.
This sums up the predicament of a wealthy family here that went to court, not to fight over who is entitled to what, but who should take over the long-delayed process of distributing the inheritance.
The task is likely to be daunting because no one person in the family has a clue about the complete list of assets, which include properties, stocks and cash in Singapore and overseas, let alone knows the exact value of each item.
The patriarch of the family had amassed such wealth because he ran a successful hardware business and was a shrewd investor.
His only fault was not letting his family know the full extent of his assets and where he had invested his funds. When he died, everything just went to his widow.
And when the matriarch died in 2012, her final will stated that all the assets should be shared equally by only the males in the family – her three sons and the eldest grandson. Her five daughters received nothing.
She named her eldest daughter, who is her first child, as the executor of her final will. In her previous will, it was stated that she would be paid $100,000 for the work.
Her second son was also named an executor of his late mother’s final will.
On paper, everything looks good, but the reality is far from perfect because the distribution cannot be carried out until someone cleans up the financial mess.
After waiting for over a decade, patience ran thin for the eldest son, 69, who went to court to get himself appointed as the executor. He argued that the current executors, his eldest sister, 75, and second brother, 61, should be sacked for failing to perform their duties “with due diligence and speed”.
The eldest daughter came across as an “honest and well-meaning” person, but the High Court found that she did not seem to know what she had to do. She tried contacting her sisters five years earlier to get the details of the inheritance since they oversaw the family’s assets during an earlier dispute.
But none of them helped her, claiming they were “busy” and “unable to do so” and she had not heard from them since. She added that she was not comfortable with writing to chase them for answers, noting that they are her siblings.
