Inheritances and wills always bring interesting stories with them, and for us lawyers, interesting cases to work on (and yes, quite a bit of legal fees along with them), and as someone who has accompanied investors abroad for a number of years, I have come across quite a few stories and cases along the way, heartbreaks and disappointments, alongside surprising discoveries and a lot of hope.
Yoni and his brother came to me on a friend's recommendation. Their father, Victor, had died about a year earlier after a serious illness. Victor divorced their mother when they were still young boys, moved to Romania and remarried. Over the years the relationship between Victor and his sons was loose, and came down to meetings and a few outings together during Victor's visits to Israel. When their mother died, Victor came to be with them during the shiva (the seven days of mourning), and during the visit it became clear that he was sick with a “disease.” The sons helped him, connected him with doctors in Israel and he began to receive treatments, so the frequency of his visits to Israel increased. The treatments did not manage to slow the spread of the “disease,” and Victor stayed in Israel while the sons cared for him and looked after him until the day he died. About half a year before he died he asked to be taken to a lawyer to dictate a will to him, and indeed he left behind a will in which, as a token of appreciation and gratitude for his sons' devotion and care for him, he bequeathed all his property to his two sons.
Yoni and his brother came to our office with the probate order issued by the Registrar of Inheritance and asked us to implement the will in Romania, to work toward its approval in Romania and the transfer of the apartments owned by Victor into their names.
This is where our story starts to get complicated. As noted, Victor had remarried in Romania, and when he passed away he was still married to Elena. Elena, who knew that Victor had died, and did not know of the existence of a will he had left behind in Israel, began proceedings in Romania to obtain an inheritance certificate.
Fortunately for Yoni and his brother, we managed to contact Elena and understood from her that the inheritance matter had not yet been finalized and approved by the Romanian notary. When I summoned her to a meeting together with the local partner, she was surprised to hear about Victor's will. At first she was stunned, and after a few minutes she began to cry. “After all our years together, we built a home, we traveled, we loved, and he leaves me with nothing,” she sobbed. “This is my home too, how could he do this to me?” she went on.
The local partner and I continued to the meeting at the notary where Elena had begun proceedings to obtain an inheritance certificate for Victor, and we presented him with Victor's death certificate and the translation of the will and the probate order.
Two days later, while the local partner and I were sitting in a meeting with an Israeli developer who wanted to build a new project in Romania, the notary called and summoned us to an urgent meeting. He did not want to explain the urgency, but said there was a problem we needed to look into. I wasn't alarmed; I am already used to Romanian lawyers or notaries creating problems to increase their fees or simply to complicate matters where everything could be solved easily by exercising judgment and common sense, so we were in no hurry to end the meeting and arrived at the notary's office only the next day toward noon.
“Elena has filed an objection to the recognition of the will and its implementation in Romania,” he opened by saying.
“She has no basis for that,” I burst out. “This is the wish of Victor, the deceased, this is what he dictated in a will that was approved and given validity by the authorities in Israel. Under the conventions between the countries, Romania must recognize the will.”
“That is something the court will probably have to decide. I cannot decide which prevails in this matter, the will recognized by the court in Israel or the Romanian inheritance law,” he said.
I felt my stress meter climbing to the sky. I left the notary's office, leaving my partner there to continue the conversation and understand what the basis was for the notary's conduct. After I drank an espresso with soda at the café across the street and calmed down a bit, I called Yoni to give him the news. After a good few seconds of silence on the other end of the line I told him: “Let us carry out an assessment of the situation. I don't believe there is any basis or any claim she can raise for the will not to be recognized, but I have to check. I think she is simply trying to delay everything in order to extract money from you.” I promised him to carry out the checks and get back to him as soon as possible.
The will's story lasted two years and made its way through two court instances in Romania, and the ruling surprised even me, despite my experience and familiarity with Romanian law.
Under Romanian law concerning the inheritance of a person who died leaving property in Romania, Elena and the sons were to divide the property in equal shares (one third each). The court ruled that since Victor's will did not state that Israeli law would apply to the will he wrote, and although we tried to argue before the court that his place of residence was Israel and that he was an Israeli citizen, so Israeli law should be applied to it, this argument was rejected because Victor also held Romanian citizenship and had been a resident of Romania for more than 25 years, and only in the 3 years before his death did he spend more time in Israel than in Romania. The court therefore ruled that Romanian law would apply to Victor's property in Romania, and not the will he left in Israel.
For those of you who own property abroad, I recommend making sure, when you leave a will behind, that it meets not only the requirements of Israeli law but also the requirements of the inheritance laws of the country where the property is located.
Stories are based on real situations, with identifying details changed. Not legal advice.
Translated from the Hebrew original. עברית