If you thought the story of Karl Lagerfeld leaving his fortune to his cat was a lone weird case, think again.
Social media is ablaze with the shocking story of Chanel’s creative director Karl Lagerfeld’s beloved cat Choupette inheriting his entire £150 million fortune after his death on Tuesday (19.09.19).
As reported by The Sauce, French newspaper Le Figaro said, the German creative director of Chanel who passed away on Tuesday (19.02.19) at the age of 85 could have his entire multi-million pound fortune handed over to his Birman feline under German law, providing she had been nominated as his “heir” through an association or foundation.
The case of a cat inheriting a fortune as other people suffer from poverty is surprisingly one of the many weird inheritance stories around the world as revealed by a spot check on the internet. Here is a list of some of the most surprising inheritance stories:
1.Dog inherited $12 million from New York hotelier
New York hotelier and real estate billionaire Leona Helmsley (called the Queen of Mean) left $12m (£5.97m) to her pet dog, Trouble. The pampered pooch received the largest bequest from Mrs. Helmsley’s will while some human members of Mrs. Helmsley’s family fared less well, with two of her four grandchildren cut out of the will entirely. The money for Trouble’s upkeep was left in the hands of her brother, Alvin Rosenthal, who inherited $10m himself.
The richest woman in Asia leaves a fortune to a feng shui master
Nina Wang, who died of cancer in 2007 at age 69, signed over her vast fortune to a previously unknown feng shui master Tony Chan as a promise for eternal life. According to Oddee, Wang changed her will in 2006 in order to leave everything to the feng shui master, voiding a previous will written four years earlier that left the fortune to her family and to charity. With no children of her own, Wang wrote a new will in 2006, two years after her ovarian cancer was diagnosed, making 48-year-old Chan her sole beneficiary.
A Portuguese Aristocrat left his money to strangers from a phone directory
Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara made an unusual distribution of his money after his death: 70 people listed in a Lisbon phone directory were contacted out of the blue after his death to be told he had made them his beneficiaries. They had been chosen at random from the directory, in front of two witnesses at a registry office 13 years before. It certainly came as a shock to them as people do not, as a rule, make wills in Portugal and why from a phone directory.
Man in the UK leaves money in a trust for Jesus Christ
In 1968, the Hampshire resident directed that his estate of £26,000 be placed in a trust for none other than Jesus Christ. The will stipulated that if Jesus didn’t claim it within 80 years, it was to be passed back to the Crown. According to Royal London, the lawyer handling the case told a Chicago newspaper: “The main stumbling block is the difficulty in proving the Lord Jesus Christ. Who can tell who is the real Jesus Christ?” The jury’s still out on this one.
British government gets money from an anonymous donor to pay off debt
In 1928, an anonymous donor left £500,000 to the British government to help with the national debt. It’s stuck in legal limbo because of an interesting stipulation made by the donor: the money can only be used to pay off the entire debt. But the UK’s bill now stands at a whopping £1.2tn more than 3,000 times the value of the bequest, which is now approximately worth £350 million. The current fund managers at Barclays are seeking permission to convert the bequest into charitable grants or hand it to the Treasury, but as yet they’ve had no luck.
These are just a few of the many cases around the world, who would you leave your fortune to, a family member, stranger or a pet?