$650 billion that nobody wants

Press, 12 February 1982, Page 13

$650 billion that nobody wants

Experts reckon that every day someone rich dies without leaving a will or naming an heir. Some have made a thriving trade in bringing estates and heirs together.

By

JUDSON BENNETT

A glittering, $650 billion fortune is lying unclaimed, just waiting for the rightful owners to come along and take it away. And one of them just could be you.

At least, that is the view of Bill Davis, a Los Angeles lawyer, who declares: “There are a lot of people who, if they did but know it, are very rich indeed." Finding fortunes for people who were totally unaware that they had any claim to them has become a highly profitable occupation for Davis and a small band of legal detectives who call themselves heir-hunters.

He explains: “Every day, someone rich dies without leaving a will or naming an heir. My job is to find them through a combination of genealogy and old-fashioned detective work.”

Recently, his searches have taken him to Mexico, Germany, Ireland. and Britain. And his journeys have certainly been worthwhile — he takes 30 per cent of any lost fortune he finds.

Currently he has a windfall of $44,000 to give to an Englishman called Brown, and recently he handed over $240,000 to’a delighted and bewildered London pensioner named Sidney Mills. It seems that everywhere in Britain you look there is money waiting to be claimed — including at least $3OO

million lying in dormant accounts in post offices, banks, and building societies.

Some of the accounts have been neglected for more than a century awaiting a claimant — and earning interest every day they are unclaimed. The Post Office has around 41 million unused accounts containing about $250 million, and the major British banks hold at least $lO million each in accounts that have lain neglected for decades.

The key to a small fortune may lie in a faded passbook in a forgotten drawer, but the chances are small — the banks say that the average sum in a dormant account is less than $4O.

The big money is in unclaimed legacies, many of them to be found in unread wills gathering dust in legal vaults. “Often, the people who made them have died without their solicitors being informed,” says a legal expert. “The beneficiaries know nothing of the money or possessions left to them. Neither governments nor the legal profession know how to solve this problem. Does anyone?"

A few months ago. a wealthy London businessman

died, apparently leaving no will. Only months later did a secret, but properly drawnup. will come to light in a London bank vault — leaving a total of $44,000 to the man's gardener, housekeeper, and secretary.

"Obviously they were delighted by the news, but the worrying thing is that had the will never been found there was no way they would have got the money," says a solicitor concerned with the fund.

One way to prevent wills becoming lost or mislaid is to have a central registry for wills, but Britain's Law Society maintains this would interfere with the liberty of people who want to keep their wills secret until their death.

In the meantime, a fortune of countless millions lies waiting to be claimed. A leading British heir-hunter, Charles Higham, a London accountant says: "At most banks, account's become dormant after two years and the money is remitted to head office after six years.

"In many cases, people change their addresses without informing their banks. Then they die and there is no way the bank can trace the beneficiaries.

"The number of bank books, share certificates, and other documents worth money which are pushed away in drawers and attics after a bereavement is astonishing.

“It would certainly pay anyone who is bequeathed documents to study them carefully before discarding them." That is advice that a Paris bank clerk. Gustav Degarnette. would have done well to have heeded when he became the sole beneficiary of an elderly aunt last summer.

Her flat, dusty and neglected. was littered with documents, old newspapers, and piles of magazines. In disgust Degarnette swept the whole lot up and burned it. He later found to his horror, that among the debris had been government stock certificates, bank books, and uncashed cheques. It seems he had consigned a legacy of nearly $60,000 to the flames. At present. Bill Davis is in Europe searching for the owners of unclaimed fortunes totalling several million. But what if the lucky recipients object to handing over 30 per cent of their windfall to the man who has brought them glad tidings? “In that case," Bill Davis says, with the faintest of smiles, "I won't tell them where the money is, or who has left it to them."