A man in his late fifties sat across from me with a worried look. I knew his father, a pleasant retiree of Romanian origin whom I had accompanied in several transactions buying and selling apartments in Romania, but we never developed a friendly relationship and all our interaction came down to the business-legal side, a lawyer-client relationship. The father had died a few months earlier, and the son, who came to my office for advice, revealed to me the whole story.
My father, Michael, or Miki as we all called him, immigrated from Romania in the 1970s and worked as a technician at Bezeq (Israel's national telecom company). After the revolution in Romania in 1989 he started traveling to Romania from time to time. He had friends there from school, but no family left. In the early 1990s, I don't remember exactly when, he bought an apartment in Bucharest at a price that was, in his words, downright ridiculous. He told my mother he wanted to stop working, take his severance pay and buy a few more apartments in Bucharest.
I remember there was a big argument at home. Mom wasn't thrilled about it and told him she had no intention of moving to Romania, and that she didn't understand what he would do with all those apartments, but Dad had a dream of becoming a property owner. I think he was a kind of entrepreneur.
He quit his job and started flying to Romania very frequently. He bought and sold properties. Over time, as my sister and I grew up, he began to extend his stays in Romania until he had almost moved his life there, coming to Israel for visits once or twice a month. He kept buying apartments, renovating, renting out, selling. I know that at some point he owned more than 50 apartments. The truth is that over the years I wasn't very interested in the assets he built up there, in his activities and affairs. I was busy with my own life: army, studies, marriage, raising children, and Dad was always there in the background, coming for visits, spoiling the grandchildren with gifts. Twice over all those years we visited him in Bucharest, and he always put a furnished, pampering apartment at our disposal.
When Dad died about half a year ago, after a difficult illness during which Mom and we cared for him, we decided at the end of the shiva (the seven days of mourning) that I would travel to Romania and start dealing with the apartments he owned. In Israel he left no will, and Mom and my sister handled a probate order (inheritance order).
It turns out that Dad apparently had a Romanian partner, Dana, who for all those years was also his secretary or bookkeeper. She is the administrator of two companies of which Dad was the shareholder, and she also holds the keys to the only property I have located in Dad's name - a 3-story building with 6 apartments in the center of Bucharest. It seems to me that some of the apartments Dad bought over the years were apparently registered in the name of Dana, his Romanian partner.
As part of the process of obtaining the probate order in Israel, my sister and I waived our share of the inheritance in favor of Mom. Mom is Dad's sole heir. I want to register the building and the apartments in Bucharest in Mom's name as soon as possible. From a conversation I had with Dana, I understand that she did not extend the apartments' lease agreements and the building has been empty for two years already, but since she is the company's administrator I don't exactly know what she is doing there. She refused to meet me, to give me the building's keys, or even to show me the companies' documents and accounting books. But I need your help beyond that. I want to carry out a comprehensive check to understand whether Dad has other properties in Romania that I haven't located.
I don't know whether Dana, the Romanian partner, was Miki's partner or only an administrator as the son described, and if they were partners, I hope that the relationship between them was regulated in a written agreement, or at the very least in the company's articles of association (if they were both shareholders in the companies), including the matter of the transfer of shares upon the death of either of them. The lack of clarity on this issue, naturally, makes it harder to take action and requires time-consuming checks.
Involvement in what is going on is critical. It is not always possible to be involved in every detail, but it is important to stay in touch with the property, with the tenants, with the managers, and to make sure the investment is running as expected. The family in Israel was emotionally and practically cut off from Miki's business, and this created great difficulty after his death.
And leaving a proper will saves headaches and unnecessary legal battles. In this case, the absence of a will led to delays and complexity in the inheritance process, which was conducted between Israel and Romania, where we were required to explain to the Romanian court, through legal opinions, what Israeli law provides regarding inheritance (which in this case differs from Romanian law), and no less so to explain the meaning of the ‘renunciation of inheritance’ that the children carried out in favor of their mother.
Stories are based on real situations, with identifying details changed. Not legal advice.
Translated from the Hebrew original. עברית