Court overturns US tycoon's will that left fortune to Panama's poor

[TheTrueCentrist]

guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/03/wilson-lucom-panama-court-ruling

Accusations fly after judges rule that Wilson Lucom’s $50m to set up foundation for poor children should go to his family instead

 

[Dale_M]

It is very sad for the poor children of Panama. They could use help:

While Panama’s capital, coastline and Canal Zone are bustling with development, dire poverty grips much of the country’s interior. Unicef estimates that more than half the country’s children younger than 5 live in poverty and nearly a third in extreme poverty. Malnutrition affects about 20 percent of young children, with more than half of indigenous children underweight.

nytimes.com/2008/06/24/world/americas/24iht-panama.4.13957787.html?pagewanted=2

On the other hand, Lucom had shown no interest in helping children (or even liking them) during his life. So the last minute creation of a trust fund, and the financial irregularities of how Lucom’s lawyer handled his accounts do look suspicious.
NYT article:

Just days before Lucom died, on June 2, 2006, Lehman created a trust to administer the children’s charity fund. He created it in St. Kitts and Nevis, a Caribbean tax haven where Lucom had gained citizenship to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

To create the trust, Lehman and Ruddy used the power of attorney that Lucom had issued to them in case he became incapacitated. But Lucom was still coherent at the time, according to some of those who saw him in the hospital, and the two men acted before they had obtained the necessary letters from doctors saying that Lucom could not make such decisions for himself.

NYT article:

In Palm Beach, a court-appointed administrator found irregularities in Lehman’s handling of a Lucom bank account in Florida. Lehman had improperly emptied it of $650,000, the administrator found, commingling some of the funds with his own office account and spending the money to hire lawyers to defend himself and the will in Panama. In addition, the administrator criticized Lehman for not revealing to the court that he owed Lucom $500,000 at the time of his death.