“My Father Was a Mysterious Real-Estate Man”

Sitting across from me was a man in his late 50s with a worried look. I had known his father, a pleasant pensioner of Romanian origin whom I had accompanied in several deals buying and selling apartments in Romania, but we never became friends, and all our interaction was strictly business and legal, a lawyer-client relationship. The father had passed away a few months earlier, and the son, who came to my office for advice, told me the full story.

Dad, Michael, or Miki as we all called him, immigrated from Romania in the 1970s and worked as a technician at Bezeq. After the 1989 revolution in Romania he started traveling there from time to time. He had school friends there; no family was left. In the early 1990s, I don’t remember exactly when, he bought an apartment in Bucharest for a price that was truly ridiculous, he said. He told Mom 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 keen, and told him she had no intention of moving to Romania and didn’t understand at all 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 often. He bought and sold properties. Over time, as my sister and I grew up, he began staying longer in Romania, until he had almost moved his life there and came to Israel for visits once or twice a month. He kept buying apartments, renovating, renting, selling. I know that at some point he owned more than 50 apartments. Truth is, over the years I wasn’t very interested in the property he built up there, in what he did or in his affairs. I was busy with my own life, the army, studies, marriage, raising kids, and Dad was always there in the background, coming to visit, spoiling the grandchildren with presents. Twice over all those years we visited him in Bucharest, and he always gave us a well-equipped, comfortable apartment.

When Dad died about six months ago, after a hard illness during which Mom and we cared for him, we decided at the end of the shiva that I would go to Romania and start dealing with the apartments he owned. In Israel he didn’t leave a will, and Mom and my sister handled the inheritance order.

It turns out Dad probably had a Romanian partner, Dana, who all those years was also his secretary or bookkeeper. She is the administrator of two companies in which Dad was the shareholder, and she also holds the keys to the only property I’ve found in Dad’s name: a 3-storey building with 6 apartments in central Bucharest. I think some of the apartments Dad bought over the years were probably registered in the name of Dana, his Romanian partner.

As part of getting the inheritance order in Israel, my sister and I renounced 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 quickly as possible. From a conversation with Dana I understand that she didn’t renew the leases on the apartments and the building has been standing empty for two years, but since she is the company’s administrator I don’t really know what she’s doing there. She wouldn’t meet me, wouldn’t give me the keys to the building and wouldn’t even show me the companies’ documents and accounts. But I need your help beyond that. I want to run a thorough search to find out whether Dad had other properties in Romania that I haven’t found.

I don’t know whether Dana, the Romanian partner, was Miki’s business partner or only an administrator, as the son described. If they were partners, I hope the relationship between them was set out in a written agreement, or at least in the company’s articles of association (if they were both shareholders), including what happens to the shares when one of them dies. The lack of clarity on this obviously makes every step harder and requires checks that eat up time.

Being involved is critical. It isn’t always possible to be involved in every detail, but it’s important to stay in touch with the property, the tenants and the managers, and make sure the investment is running as expected. The family in Israel was emotionally and practically cut off from Miki’s business, and that created great difficulty after his death.

And leaving a proper will saves headaches and unnecessary legal battles. In this case, the lack of a will led to delays and complications in the inheritance process, which ran between Israel and Romania. We had to explain to the Romanian court, through legal opinions, what Israeli law says on inheritance (which in this case differs from Romanian law), and no less important, to explain the meaning of the “renunciation of inheritance” the children made in favor of their mother.