The trust documents, Owen explained, did not automatically give our daughters ownership of a fortune just because they were descendants.They established obligations and possible beneficiary interests governed by specific terms and dates.
Verification would require an independent trust attorney and a court-supervised accounting if the trustees refused to cooperate.
Still, the principle shook me.
Ada had tried to protect a generation she would never meet, and Malcolm may have used those protections as a private source of liquidity.
There was a second schedule attached to the files.
It concerned a small design company folded into Whitcomb Properties and showed payments for licensing fees on projects carrying my original drawings.
Rather than being passed through to me, those amounts had been booked as intercompany income.Ames warned us not to leap from suspicious entries to criminal accusations.
Business records sometimes have legitimate explanations, and a full review was necessary.
But his old emails showed that he had asked for those explanations repeatedly and never received them.
