Your Inheritance Abroad: Is the Will You Wrote Enough?

Inheritances and wills always bring interesting stories with them, and interesting cases for us lawyers (and yes, quite a few fees alongside them). Having accompanied investors abroad for several years now, I’ve come across quite a few stories and cases: heartbreak and disappointment, 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 teenagers, moved to Romania and remarried. Over the years the relationship between Victor and his sons was loose, limited to meetings and a little time together when Victor visited Israel. When their mother died, Victor came to be with them during the shiva, and during that visit it turned out he had “the disease”. The sons helped him, connected him with doctors in Israel, and he started treatment, so his visits to Israel became more frequent. The treatment didn’t manage to slow the spread of “the disease”, and Victor stayed in Israel, where his sons cared for him until the day he died. About six months before his death, he asked them to take him to a lawyer so he could dictate a will, and indeed he left a will in which, as a mark of appreciation and gratitude for his sons’ devotion and care, he left all his property to his two sons.

Yoni and his brother came to our office with the order probating the will, issued by the Inheritance Registrar, and asked us to implement the will in Romania, have it recognized there, and get the apartments Victor owned transferred to their names.

This is where our story gets complicated. As I said, Victor had remarried in Romania, and when he died he was still married to Elena. Elena, who knew Victor had died but didn’t know about the will he had left in Israel, started proceedings in Romania to obtain a certificate of inheritance.

Luckily for Yoni and his brother, we managed to contact Elena and learned from her that the inheritance had not yet been finalized and approved by the Romanian notary. When I invited her to a meeting together with our local partner, she was surprised to hear about Victor’s will. At first she was stunned, and after a few minutes she started crying. “After all our years together, we built a home, we traveled, we loved, and he leaves me with nothing,” she sobbed. “It’s my home too, how could he do this to me?” she went on.

The local partner and I went on to a meeting with the notary where Elena had started the proceedings for Victor’s certificate of inheritance, and presented him with Victor’s death certificate, the translation of the will and the probate order.

Two days later, while the local partner and I were 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 didn’t want to explain the urgency, but said there was a problem we needed to address. I didn’t get worked up. I’m used to Romanian lawyers or notaries creating problems to increase their fees, or just complicating things where everything could be solved easily with some judgment and common sense, so we didn’t rush to end our meeting, and we only got to the notary’s office the next day, around noon.

“Elena has filed an objection to the recognition of the will and its implementation in Romania,” he began.

“She has no basis for it,” I burst out. “This was Victor’s wish, the deceased’s. It’s what he dictated in a will that was approved and validated by the authorities in Israel. Under the treaties between the countries, Romania must recognize the will.”

“That will probably have to be decided by the court. I can’t decide what prevails here, the will recognized by the court in Israel or Romanian inheritance law,” he said.

I felt my stress meter shoot through the roof. I walked out of the notary’s office, leaving my partner there to continue the conversation and understand what was behind the notary’s approach. After an espresso and a soda at the café across the street, once I had calmed down a little, I called Yoni to break the news. After a good few seconds of silence on the other end, I said: “Let us assess the situation. I don’t believe she has any basis or argument she can raise to stop the will being recognized, but I have to check. I think she’s simply trying to delay everything to squeeze money out of you.” I promised him I would run the checks and get back to him as soon as possible.

The story of the will went on for two years, through two levels of court in Romania, and the outcome surprised even me, despite my experience and knowledge of Romanian law.

Under Romanian law on the inheritance of a person who died leaving property in Romania, Elena and the sons were to share the property equally (a third each). The court ruled that since Victor’s will did not state that Israeli law would apply to it, and although we argued before the court that his place of residence was Israel and he was an Israeli citizen, so Israeli law should apply, that 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 Victor’s property in Romania was governed, as I said, by Romanian law, and not by the will he had left in Israel.

For those of you who own property abroad, I recommend making sure that when you leave a will, it meets not only the requirements of Israeli law but also the requirements of inheritance law in the country where the property is located.