A team of lawyers and historians is tracking down heirs to estates around the globe.
It wasn’t the most lucrative, but certainly one of the most moving cases Nicolas Forster’s team has handled in recent years: While searching for the rightful heirs of a Hungarian who had fled to Great Britain, the genealogists tracked down an 85-year-old relative living in desolate conditions in Sopron. “With an inheritance of 60,000 pounds, she moved to Budapest and started a new life,” says Forster.
In his law firm at Stubentor and its branches in the federal states, the 36-year-old employs around 40 historians and lawyers to track down heirs to ownerless estates. To do this, they research archives, church registers, and even old telephone and address books worldwide for relatives of the deceased.
This is also the case in a recent case, which Forster’s team became aware of through a KURIER report: Since 1990, Australian authorities have been searching for the heirs of an immigrant from Vienna. The sum of €2.8 million is at stake. “The trail leads to Ukraine,” says Forster. Whether it will lead to the desired outcome is questionable, however. Forster fears that the deceased’s relatives perished in the Holocaust.
If no heir is found, the estate reverts to the state. In this way, the Republic of Austria collected no less than €7.5 million in assets in 2011 alone.
So, a lot of money is at stake – and a good deal. If an heir is found, a fee is agreed upon, which, depending on the research effort, can amount to up to 35 percent of the estate. Forster considers this a reasonable sum.
“Law firms in the USA charge even more. Moreover, if we don’t find an heir, we’re left with the research costs.” And in most cases, the heirs would accept these conditions without question. In some cases, however, the law firm has even had to fight for its fees in court.
Race It’s no wonder, in any case, that offices around the world are engaged in bitter competition for the most lucrative cases. “We fight hard, but fair,” says Forster.
His office handles around 1,200 cases a year, primarily from the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Around 300 are resolved, even if it often takes years. The estate amounts usually range between 6,000 and 10,000 euros. The record case involved an inheritance of 2.5 million euros that went to Germany.
Forster is still pained by the case in which, after painstaking research, an heir to an estate worth more than one million euros was tracked down in Wellington, New Zealand. Despite endless attempts to persuade him, the heir simply refused to accept the money.
The reason: “He was afraid that his wife might be kidnapped,” Forster recalls. “And who would cook for him then?”
