When Leona Helmsley, the tyrannical hotel tycoon, drafted her will, the witness who signed it must have been a bit surprised. Helmsley bequeathed $12m (£6m) to Trouble, her beloved Maltese dog. Two of her four grandchildren were cut out of her will entirely.
The news sparked an uproar when it was made public in the press a few weeks ago. But the truth is that this difficult heiress from Manhattan is one of a line of wealthy, eccentric types who have opted to structure their wills creatively and set aside substantial sums to provide for their pets.
Consider the following. In 1992, Karlotta Libenstein, a German countess, left $60m to Gunter III, her German Shepherd dog. When Gunter III died, the money was passed to his pup, Gunter IV – now arguably the world’s richest animal. In 1999, Donald Moss, a millionaire from Cheshire, awarded a friend £50,000 to take care of his tortoise, Big Tibby. And most recently, in 2002, a Londoner named Margaret Layne left a trust worth tens of thousands of pounds and a house in Harrow to a stray cat she rescued.
“It’s quite a common desire for people in this country to look to benefit an animal when they write their wills,” says Paula James, a solicitor with the firm Thomas Eggar. “People will say they have emotional attachments to the oddest of things: animals, garden tools, collections of one sort or another.”
But in the UK, to leave money to care for an animal as part of a will requires some craftsmanship. Technically, it is impossible to leave money directly to a dog as any legal action required cannot be enforced. James puts it rather simply: “The pooch can’t go off to the high court and say I haven’t got my money.”
So the primary way to leave money to an animal is to set the money aside in a trust structure and ask a beneficiary who receives the grant to care for the animal. Another option is to leave money to a charity which would bear responsibility for finding the animal another home.
Solicitors report that money left on a conditional basis can pose problems for the executors responsible for administering the will. As it stands, a will writer must appoint two executors, both over 18 years’ old, one being the person most likely to be a major beneficiary and the second a friend or relative.
Bitter legal disputes can ensue if pets are involved. Expensive posthumous battles often stem from an animal not being looked after properly or dying while under the care of his beneficiary, solicitors report.
Another complication is that under UK law, beneficiaries who receive money to care for an animal face only a moral obligation to fulfil their duty, not a legal one. Or sometimes, the animal itself can face a law suit.
Just weeks after Helmsley’s death, Zamfira Sfara, her former housekeeper, is already reported to be weighing the possibility of suing Trouble who is said to have bitten her many times.
In the UK, families are permitted to contest wills on the grounds that the maker of the will lost mental capacity when the will was made.
If a judge determines the will maker had not understood the full extent of the consequences of his or her actions, inheritances can therefore be redistributed.
If the family cat receives a large chunk of money and a dependent child or spouse is left without an inheritance, for example, the courts will reopen a will to consider the needs and resources of the beneficiaries and potential beneficiaries and redistribute the will, according to the Provision for Families and Dependants Act.
Will-making has become more creative in recent years as people have become savvier about their assets and their personal lives have become more complex.
Figuring out how to leave money to animals is not the only item that can put solicitors and tax advisers in a muddle.
One London solicitor has a client who wants to leave a cash legacy of £100m to “whatever girlfriend he has at the time of his death”.
Another wants to leave each of his beneficiaries a case of port. A third wants to give each of her nieces permission to buy a hat costing up to £1,000. Mike Warburton, a tax adviser with Grant Thornton, has a client who aims to award £5,000 to each secretary who worked for him.
The wealthier the will writer, the more eccentric the demands, solicitors say.
But while creative will writing is on the rise, it remains unusual for clients to offer original instructions.
“It would be nice if every time someone came in to make a will, there were new ideas, but in practice people are quite predictable in what they want to do,” says William Hancock, a partner with Speechly Bircham.
“Most of my clients have a finite amount of assets and they are simply looking to protect those assets from inheritance tax and pass along what is left to survivors.”
