Theft of assets belonging to an estate

Robert_McGeddon

Not having read the thread from the beginning………

If there’s enough IHT headroom in the Estate I’d be tempted to suggest the Executor adds £30K to the estate assets and creates a £30K debtor from the miscreant. Assuming they’re a residual beneficiary they then receive a lower final payout

pjs493

user1977 said:

I can only reiterate my advice from six months ago. The police (and the CPS and every other agency involved in criminal justice) are overstretched, and the victims have other remedies available to them. Which also involve a lower standard of proof and probably swifter and more certain timescales.

As this point I think the widow just wants it all to go away so she can grieve. She felt obligated to report the theft in her role as executor and now feels that if the police aren’t interested then it might just be better to forget about it and try to move on from it. Quoting third hand (it’s the step mother in law of my cousin) ‘it’s all just material things at the end of the day’. I think she’s just lost the will to fight it and feels she’s done her duty as executor to the best of her ability by reporting the crime. To take things further would just make family matters more volatile and ultimately cost money, which she doesn’t feel is a good way to spend the assets from the estate or her own money. 

pjs493

kipsterno1 said:

In cases of theft it is the CPS that make a charging decision. The police present the evidence and the CPS review it to see if the threshold is met. I would recontact the officer you have been dealing with and ask to see the CPS decision. 

From what I gather she tried several times to get more information out of the PC dealing with it and in the end he just stopped responding to her emails. He wouldn’t elaborate beyond saying it was decided it was a civil matter because the will didn’t explicitly list the items individually, he didn’t seem to care about the other evidence provided and it apparently wasn’t used during the interview. 

Edited to add: I believe she asked to be connected to his sgt to get clearer answers and that’s when he stopped responding to her emails. 

pjs493

Pennylane said:

I can tell you now from experience that the Police will not do anything.  They will say it’s a civil matter.  Happened in our family sadly.  

It’s a real shame isn’t it? By this logic I cpuls
walk into my neighbour’s garden, steal their expensive bbq and avoid prosecution by arguing that I thought it was mine and I could take it. If simply knowing the person who steals from someone else automatically
makes the police consider it a civil matter then what’s preventing that scenario. Surely if one knows the identity of the thief, it makes the job of the police and CPS easier. It seems the legal advice the widow received was sound and suggested it was an open and shut criminal case. Shame the police would rather avoid prosecuting easy to convict crimes just to keep crime stats down. 

pjs493

Robert_McGeddon said:

Not having read the thread from the beginning………

If there’s enough IHT headroom in the Estate I’d be tempted to suggest the Executor adds £30K to the estate assets and creates a £30K debtor from the miscreant. Assuming they’re a residual beneficiary they then receive a lower final payout

Everything was left to the widow (the deceased’s third wife). The four children from two previous marriages (all grown up some with children of their own) were offered generous gifts from the father before he died (cancer) and they knew at the time he intended to leave everything to his wife. So they are not a residual beneficiary. 

I’m also sure that if they wanted something for a sentimental reason, the father would have gifted it at the time he made his deathbed gifts of cars, money into grand children’s JISAs, etc. The widow has also said that if there was something in particular in the house that had belonged to the thief’s mother, for example, she’d be happy to gift it. The father and his first wife bought the house decades ago. He was widowed with two young children, remarried and was widowed again with two more children, and then married his third wife in later life. So he and subsequent two wives lived in the house as well has his four children who all moved out years ago as young adults. 

The child who stole the goods is apparently upset that the step mother inherited everything, especially as she has a grown up daughter of her own from a previous relationship. So the assumption by the thief is that everything that belonged to their mother, first step mother, and father will all end up going to the step sister. Out of the four children it’s worth noting that the thief is the least financially stable (the only one not owning their own home for example), so the money seems to have been a primary motivation, whereas the other siblings feel they have enough of their own money and don’t care what their dad decided to do with his accumulated wealth, property, etc.  

Keep_pedalling

I am not surprised she was angry in seeing her mother’s personal effects going to end up with a stranger. Although this does not justify the theft her father’s will was a recipe for trouble. Why did he not leave his third wife a life interest in his estate (especially the property) rather than as an absolute gift? 

I 

Malthusian

pjs493 said:
By this logic I could walk into my neighbour’s garden, steal their expensive bbq and avoid prosecution by arguing that I thought it was mine and I could take it. If simply knowing the person who steals from someone else automatically makes the police consider it a civil matter then what’s preventing that scenario.

You tell us, you're the one without a brand new expensive barbeque.

Decades of social conditioning, physical fear of what your neighbour might do, how your family would react, the risk to your career, the barbeque isn't worth making an enemy of your neighbour, maybe even personal ethics... take your pick.

Estates are different because the original owner is dead and not around to assert their own rights. That job falls to the executor, who typically wants the job over and done with as quickly as possible, and is obliged to consider the interests of all the heirs, which a living person is not. (In other words, your neighbour may sue you in civil court for the return of their property and damn the expense, while their executor may be legally compelled to let it go, because it would not be in the interests of the beneficiaries to spend thousands of pounds to recover something with a resale value of a few hundred.) 

There is a reason you keep seeing "Wills bring out the worst in people" around these parts.

pjs493

Keep_pedalling said:

I am not surprised she was angry in seeing her mother’s personal effects going to end up with a stranger. Although this does not justify the theft her father’s will was a recipe for trouble. Why did he not leave his third wife a life interest in his estate (especially the property) rather than as an absolute gift? 

I 

Personal effects from the mother were given to her children years ago (eg jewellery, etc). She died in the 1980s. The stolen items were purchased by the father between marriages. The only link to the mother is the house. The father bought it with wife #1 in the 1970s and lived in it ever since with wives #2 and #3 raising children from marriages 1 and 2 in it. He married wife 3 later in life so there are no children from that marriage. 

All four children (all adults now most with children of their own) (two from marriage 1 and two from marriage 2) were offered things before the father died. Some declined and suggested money be put in grandchildren’s JISAs, some accepted gifts such as a new car.

All children knew that the father and step mother had left everything to each other in mirror wills. The father and wife 3 were financially co-dependant so it obviously made sense to them to write their wills that way, they’d been married for at least 15 years and I think they lived together for a time before that. I think it might be his longest marriage as wife 1 died of cancer when the children were young and wife 2 died in a car crash also when her children were young. 

As he died from a long illness, all children knew what the arrangements were and the thief had plenty of opportunity to ask for the items as a gift if they had a sentimental attachment to them, but it appears there just went in and grabbed stuff of value while the step mother was visiting the funeral director to plan the funeral. 

TBagpuss

I wonderwhat sepmother's plans are? She seems to have been open to her husband's cildren having sentimental iems - for all we know, she's made a will including her step children in which case in her position, I;d reduce the thief's share by £30,000 (or to 0) 

It would be open to her to make a formal complaint the police - £30,000 is not 'petty'. I t would alos be open to her to pursue civil remedies but if she is the beneficiary, then as she is the one who is losing out, it is her choice if she decides that she would sooner lose £30K than deal with any further hassle.