Thanks. Does it follow that such a claim for fraud would be for damages only and not rescission of the HoA ? Given that the principal litigation for ownership has been stayed by virtue of the HoA, I am assuming that the outstanding case or any subsequent case would not overrule the original order
The remarks on The Other Site, to the effect that Kristi and her two sisters did not include #0384 in their probate court inventory of the assets of the Karl Kleve estate, suggest yet another pile of merde (as they say in Brussels) that Ford and Lawson seem to have stepped in. In the USA, the net value of a probate estate in excess of about $5 million is subject to a federal estate tax. The tax on the first $1 million of the excess is about $350,000. Then it's $400,000 per million from $6 million to Les Wexner territory and beyond. If the Kleve estate held title to an item worth $18 million, and the heirs failed to declare it, they'll need to file an amended inventory to correct the "oversight," and also get ready to write a check to the IRS for $5.15 million. On the bright side, maybe the transfer of ownership to Joe Ford will shift the tax burden from the estate to him. This I do not know.
Damages are the default remedy for a tort, unless damages do not give adequate relief. I wouldn't even go there with this case, however. If the crack team of Ford-Smith-Rinear ever do manage to effect service on Swaters and Lawson, the case will certainly be consolidated with Swaters v. Lawson and stayed.
As an executor of two estates, I don't understand how you make this argument. As an attorney, you will know the law, but as a lay person, you are not expected to know the law. Hence hiring an attorney to handle and guide you through the process. When my mother, unexpentanly passed away, we dealt with all legal aspects as best we could. That doesn't mean, in any way, we had full concept of her full estate. Honestly, after two years, I don't think we do so now. We filed based on what we have figured out. We have amended as needed. I can not expect any reason we would have known the difference. To claim some one should have know is simply not realistic.
Shawn, can your probate experience help with an explaination of the powers of a Probate Court to adjudicate ownership ? Joes post 562 in 2011 reflects a statement made in Lawsons defence memorandum of 9th July 2010 where she stated the "Probate Court adjudicated the ownership and title rights to 0384AM vehicle" and that on 27th October 2006 (a year after Jacques NOT Florence raised his initial complaint) the Probate Court specifically authorised the transfer of the title into the names of Karl Kleves three daughters names. If the statement on the "other site" is true and 0384AM (including the parts Lawson tried to sell) was not included in the estate, then this statement, the court filing and the title must be false. This latest, to use Joes words, "game changing" revelation, may also explain the eleventh hour attempt to get an injunction in Ohio trying to stop Swaters litigating in London. All will no doubt be revealed in front of Justice Flaux next Friday, unless Joe gets there first.
Bill, the motion for the injunction is up on the other site and it would be great to have your view on the jurisdictional authorities of Ohio over London. In summary terms, the defendants have published (Contempt of Court ?) the transcript of the London case hearing and are seeking an injunction to stop Swaters and Gardner litigating issues in London that are currently stayed in Ohio, claiming that the London Court should deal solely with the disputes relating to the HoA. I am surprised they have not included Justice Flaux in the injunction as he did most of the talking and Gardner was not even in Court.
I'm sorry, I was making a little joke about Kristi Lawson and her sisters being personally liable for the federal estate taxes that would be due if it were discovered that an asset of a decedent's estate, worth $18 million, had not been properly passed through probate. I was just batting out that post at 8:30 p.m. last night, and aiming for humor, not accuracy. The correct analysis is that, at the time of his death, Karl Kleve owned many assets, and might have had some debts, too. When he passed, his ownership interests in these assets needed to be transferred to his heirs. Most people handle this with a living trust. They transfer the ownership of their major assets to a fictitious entity, using a document which also names the people who will take ownership upon the death of the settlor. With decedents who have not created a living trust, and/or who have not left a will, their assets pass to their heirs according to statutory rules of intestate succession. My understanding is that Karl Kleve's estate passed by intestate succession. OK, so at the moment of his death, Karl Kleve owned what he owned. No one else is expected to know what this included. But this is the purpose of getting the court involved: to supervise the identification and the rounding up of the decedent's assets; to supervise their liquidation or other disposition; and with respect to those assets which are not liquidated, to supervise the transfer of ownership to a living person or persons. Another purpose of the courts' involvement is to protect the interests of debtors; i.e., to pay the debts owed to them by the decedent. In the case of estates with net values in excess of $5 million, *the* major creditor is going to be the IRS. This is what puts the poop on the Lawson and Ford footwear. They have no ownership interest in #0384 which has not been transferred to Karl Kleve's heirs through a judicially supervised probate estate. If #0384 was not listed in the inventory that Lawson filed with the probate court, then the law will say that ownership interest continues to be the property of the probate estate. Only by reopening the probate case and amending the inventory, and also amending the probate court's orders of disposition of the estate, can ownership of #0384 pass to Karl Kleve's heirs. It is at this point that the IRS gets interested -- very interested. Thanks to the June 2014 auction results, we know for a fact that the ownership interest that Lawson claims to have in #0384 is worth at least $18 million. To the extent that this claim is true, the car must pass through the probate case, and among other things its value must be included in the probate estate for federal estate tax purposes. In short, to the extent that Ford and Lawson claim that Karl Kleve owned 100% of #0384 at the time of his death, they must run that ownership interest through the probate estate, and the estate must pay the 40% federal tax on the $13 million by which the value of #0384 exceeds the "personal exemption" of $5 million, that the tax code extends to the estate. On the other side of the ownership issue are Swaters, Gardner and Bonhams. Presumably they do not want the Karl Kleve estate to incur this heavy tax debt, and they will contend that it should not, on the ground that neither Karl Kleve nor his estate had or have any ownership interest in #0384. Presumably they will contend that the reason that Lawson did not include an ownership interest in #0384 in her probate inventory is that there was no such ownership interest. Presumably the reason that Lawsons omission of this ownership interest has been reported on The Other Site is that Swaters, Gardner and Bonhams intend to use the omission as evidence that an ownership interest on the part of Karl Kleve, at the time of his death, simply did not exist. That's where the schadenfreude comes from: that the Lawson and Ford claim of an ownership interest requires them to accept a $5 million estate tax liability, while their opponents want very much to shield Lawson and Ford from this exposure. Unfortunately the first rule of humor is that if you have to explain a joke it's not funny. Rarely has a joke been explained so thoroughly. So it must not be a very good one.
The Other Site has added some document images to its item about the omission of #0384 from the inventory of Karl Kleve's probate estate. These documents illuminate what I wrote about in my previous posts. One of The Other Site's new documents is a 21-page Inventory and Appraisal that Lawson filed with the probate court on 16 March 2005. I have attached jpegs of five selected pages. The first page shows a line item of $86,770 for Tangible Personal Property. This is the category which would include any cars or car parts owned by Karl Kleve at his death. The third page shows a line item for "Automobiles and auto parts detailed on Exhibit D attached hereto," in the same amount as the line item on page one for Tangible Personal Property: $86,770. The fourth and fifth pages constitute the referenced "Exhibit D." It lists 29 cars and a trailer. It also lists "Miscellaneous Parts," in the amount of $25,000. It does not list any Ferrari. My guess is that this list is a transcription of an inventory that Karl Kleve himself prepared. It is doubtful that Kristi Lawson personally dug through all his caches of cars and parts to prepare this list, or that she could differentiate a 1927 Rolls Royce from a '29 or a '31. The statements that "I certify the above information to be complete and accurate to the best of my knowledge," and that "These values were determined after reviewing Old Cars Price Guide and Old Car Trader valuation guides," are unlikely to have been anything other than a transcription of verbiage that Karl Kleve included in the original document. The prices stated for some of these cars simply do not comport with the collector car market in 2005-2006. In other words, I believe the source of this Exhibit D was Karl Kleve's own listing of the cars to which he claimed an ownership interest, as of the time when he prepared the document. He included no Ferrari. I would go further and propose the possibility that the $25,000 valuation of his collection of car parts reflects a silent acknowledgement on his part that he had no ownership interest in the 0384 parts then in his possession. But that is probably going too far. The second new document on The Other Site is an Application for Sale/Transfer of Motor Vehicle, that Lawson filed with the probate court on 27 October 2006. It states that Lawson was on that date "in possession of . . . [a] motor vehicle belonging to the estate"; that this motor vehicle was a 1955 Ferrari, serial no. 0384AM; and that Lawson and her two sisters are "entitled to such motor vehicle . . . by the statute of descent and distribution." On the basis of these perjured submissions, Judge James Cissell ordered Lawson (the "fiduciary") to "transfer said motor vehicle as prayed for." This perjured submission, and the court's fraudulently induced order to transfer #0384 to Lawson and her sisters, is probably the basis of Joe Ford's post that, "in 2005, . . . Kristi Kleve, daughter and administrator for Karl Kleve's estate, had the Ferrari as an asset in the estate, and she intended to pursue it," "it" being a claim to 100% ownership of the car in Swaters's possession. Lawson's perjury and fraud on the court need no further comment. But if we accept the Lawson-Ford contention that Karl Kleve owned 100% of #0384 at his death, and that this ownership interest did properly pass to Lawson and her sisters through the probate estate, a very unpleasant reckoning with the IRS would be a distinct possibility. The valuation of a probate estate at $779,358.65, when it included an $18 million asset, would be tax fraud pure and simple. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
who's poop'n who... you consider yourself an attorney... current value cannot be applied to an asset filing retro actively, 10 year ago values entirely different, the asset was in limbo as to whether it was "whole", restored, or a pile of parts waiting final disposition...any value greater than zero assigned years ago would be a best guess and must look to the asset as it was last known when it left the property... ridiculous asserting 18 million value
This has a few logic flaws. The car at that time was GONE, stolen and reported stolen....so the CURRENT value of your appraisal, attached to a piece of paper in a drawer (the Title as Kleve held at the time, and a long odds recovery effort), I don't think it would have been required to pay inheritance tax, on that amount (which at the time of his passing would have been a subjective apprasal at best).. ???
Thank you... The value of the family silver has probably gone up too (although it's fallen from fashion, you have to polish it all the time!)
Its obvious to me that Bill has a real hard on for Joe. His legal analysis has slipped into what seems to be a vendetta against Joe.
I guess Big Tex, cheesy and I will have to agree to disagree. I do consider myself an attorney, because I am one. Cheesy's frequent outbursts of bizarre legal rules, with never a citation to authority, indicates that he is not an attorney, and not very well acquainted with the way the world works in any respect. We can conclude this exchange with me writing that the Karl Kleve estate, valued at $780,000, required another $4,220,000 in net worth to put it into federal estate tax liability; that Lawson and Ford claim that Karl Kleve's probate estate included a claim to 100% ownership of the complete running car that they knew to be in Jacques Swaters's possession as of the October 2006 filing of Lawson's perjured application to transfer the ownership of this asset to her and her sisters; that this asset as of October 2006 was worth far in excess of $4,220,000; that $10,000,000 is a conservative appraised value as of October 2006 (still on the boom side of the Great Recession, remember); that IRS rules might allow a reduction of appraised value with respect to an asset as to which the estate's claim to ownership is contingent on a successful legal proceeding to quiet title to that asset; that I don't know if IRS rules do or don't allow such a reduction, but that it is unlikely that the reduction would reduce the value of the asset from $10,000,000 to less than $4,220,000; and that neither Big Tex nor Cheesy have any personal knowledge one way or the other with respect to any of these statements. This is about as good as we can do in an internet message board debate. I am attaching a screen shot from the IRS web site which is not inconsistent with what I have written, but which is inconsistent with a contention that Lawson's October 2006 perjured application, and the omission of #0384 from the similarly perjured inventory she filed in the probate estate, have no tax consequences. There are many other similar tea leaves and/or on-point and dispositive authorities out there for the asking, but I'm not going to bother finding them and citing them for a conversation with people whose minds are irrevocably closed to evidence. Image Unavailable, Please Login
According to Hagerty a 1955 250GT that was worth close to $600K in 2006 is now worth x4 more today. We may therefore estimate that 0384 was worth in 2006 one fourth of $18M it is worth today : $4.5M. If included in the estate, that's will bring the total to $5.3M, so 40% of taxes could be due over $3.3M or $1.32M, a not insignificant amount. https://www.hagerty.com/valuationtools/hvt/vehiclesearch/Report?vbe=103452
I am only stating that were it I, there would not have been a "set aside" for tax liabilty for a horse that was out of the barn, over the hill and far, far away. The odds at that point were that the car would NOT return. And IMO only, still are! The "facts of life" in regard to stolen exotics, is that once they cross international borders, recovery and repatriation become all but impossible. This is not the only example, of that fact.
I think in on of his last video depositions, Karl mentions $2.5M? Close enough, for hand grenades. You see that phrase in the cited IRS instructions "fair market value"?? I think we can all agree based upon the vintage storage photos, that this was a $2.5M asset that needed probably 700- $800K worth of repair!
Recall the 1962 250GTO, that left Victoria, TX. for $6000. I recently met an old codger in a bar that recalled that car......
Yes, but in 2006 the car was fully restored. Anyway, I hope that the parties reach a settlement soon. I know, hope springs eternal...
+1 Ms Lawson used a lawfirm that specialized in Ohio wills and estates. They assisted in passing the claim to the asset (Ferrari) and the Ferrari parts through probate. A Probate Court Order passed title to the stolen car and passed the Ferrari parts to Kleve's heirs. I do not place much credence in the opinion of an insurance attorney from California. (Sorry Bill, your opinion "work" is simply substandard - there is no other way to honestly describe it.) At the time of Kleve's death there was no physical car in the estate, only the uncertain legal claim to 0384AM plus the original parts. What is the value of that uncertain legal claim? An owner of that uncertain legal claim had to spend several hundred thousand just to get some traction, practically cancelling out the value of the parts. After investing that money towards the uncertain claim, the value of the claim has likely increased, but it is still not realized. I will stick with the work product of the Ohio wills and estate attorneys that were paid to do a job, which they did. There is a reason that "other site" is grasping at such straws and spreading dis-information. It is not what winners do, nor is it honest. I wish I could say more . . . And Bill, please stop misleading this board. And now I and my girlfriend are being stalked at our home. Who do you think left a melon on top of my MGB, oblivious of the cameras? This saga just gets sicker and sicker. Joe * Image Unavailable, Please Login
I won't deny my "work" posted to this thread falls short of the professional standard of care that would apply if I were an attorney providing legal services to a client. But that's not what I'm doing here, and I've never pretended otherwise. I'm just a guy with a keyboard typing posts to an internet message board. Your friend The Board can believe what I write or be skeptical or disagree entirely. Neither I nor The Board is any worse for wear, regardless of my accuracy or The Board's response. You and your pathetic team of Smith and Reardon, on the other hand, are providing legal services to clients, and your work product is invariably far worse than mine. Regarding this rabbit hole that started as a joke but has given birth to more than a page of unedifying tittle tattle, I did a few minutes more of web searching, with respect to IRS evaluation of probate assets consisting of contingent claims. What I got is that the IRS requires a probate estate to list all estate assets and to give a value to each asset, the purpose being to determine the federal estate tax liability of the probate estate. It turns out that cheesey was correct, and I was wrong, that the date of valuation is not the date on which the inventory is made, or amended. Rather, the date of valuation is the decedent's date of death. WilyB's 25% rule pegged the value of #0384, as of the October 2016 date of Lawson's perjured application to transfer the car, at $4,500,000. My understanding is that Karl Kleve passed in December 2003. I don't know how much appreciation there was between 2003 and 2006, but let's assume it was 20%. This would give us a 2003 value of $3,600,000. That's not nothing, and certainly not something that an "expert" probate attorney would advise his client not to include in the inventory. If the probate attorney had a client who was not lying to him with respect to this new-found asset. The IRS also recognizes the concept of contingent claims: that the value that a contingent claim will yield, if all contingencies are resolved in favor of the claimant, should be discounted to recognize the uncertainty with respect to each of the contingencies. The acceptable methods to calculate an IRS-ready contingency discount are many, but the discount claimed by the estate had best err on the high side if the administrator and her attorneys don't want IRS audits, penalties, and interest in their future. In other words, cheesey and Big Tex -- and Joe Ford, Kristi Lawson, and all of Lawson's alleged expert probate attorneys -- are wrong, and I am right, that the value of a contingent claim is not nothing. The "personal exemption" in effect for probate estates in 2003 was $1 million, and the rate for each dollar of net worth above the first $1 million was 49%, or $490,000 per $1 million. I don't know if the 2003 year-of-death rate applied, or if the applicable rate was the rate for the year in which the estate got its final sign-off from the probate court. But later years and later rates were 2004 -- $1.5 million -- 48%; 2005 -- $1.5 million -- 47%; 2006 -- $2 million -- 46%; 2007 -- $2 million -- 45%. Given that the assets themselves must be valued as of the date of death, and given that the higher exemptions and lower rates of later years would tend to delay the process, my guess is that the applicable rate is the year-of-death rate. Remember that the declared value of the Karl Kleve estate was $780,000. So under the 2003 rates, only an additional $220,000 would put the estate into estate tax liability, at a rate of 49%! Do you really think the contingent value of Karl Kleve's claim to ownership, seen from a December 2003 perspective, was less than $220,000? If so, you need to go back in this thread and retract quite a lot of your breast-beating statements over the years. In any event, it is clear that Lawson had and has a duty to reopen the Kleve probate estate, to amend the inventory, and to file an estate tax return which reflects an IRS-ready valuation of Kleve's contingent claim to #0384. That is, Lawson has a duty to do these things, if she continues to contend that the Karl Kleve estate included a claim to 100% ownership of the car, of which she falsely represented to be in possession in October 2006. As I have already written, it is you and Lawson who have stepped into this dilemma, with your perjured claims, your frauds on the court, and your fraudulent Certificates of Title. Your opponents vigorously argue that you do not have to do these things, because the Kleve estate does not include this contingent claim. Excuse me, but I think that's kind of funny. By the way, who was the author of the two cars and parts inventory pages included in the 2004 inventory? Am I right, that it was Karl Kleve himself? My guess is that the county was after him for property taxes on his various real properties, the assessor noticed all the antique cars, and asked for an inventory of the cars and their values. Naturally, Kleve lied about the values, to keep the assessed values low. I'm just guessing. But this seems a likely scenario. What say you? And please, don't mislead The Board!
Hi Bill, Concerning your inquiry as to whether the inventory pages were prepared by another party for the Estate Administrator, Kristine Lawson- If that was the case, I can guess who the author was based on the documents (there's something in there that is a clue from the time I worked on the recovery efforts). My guess is that if Karl were involved, it would have been with help. I base this on his dementia that you may recall discussions of earlier in this thread. Setting aside the valuation issue of 0384 for a moment, I've looked at "Exhibit D to Amended Inventory and Schedule of Assets Estate of Karl Kleeve". Of the 32 assets listed with a Total valuation of $86,770, I have first hand familiarity with the majority, if not all, of the 29 vehicles (and the parts). Based on condition, and market value at the time, there is no (0) material misstatement of value of any of these assets. The dollar figures were correct. This is, of necessity, taking into account what was sworn to between the Total and the Signature at the bottom of the second page. To be clear, I am stating for the record that you are wrong in your guess that, "Naturally, Kleve lied about the values, to keep the assessed values low. I'm just guessing. But this seems a likely scenario." The figure of $86,770 USD in 2003 for those assets was a fair assessment of them based on condition at the time. Best Regards, Dave
We are now told there was a professional probate firm handling Kleves estate "who know their job" which, from what we are told by Joe is: In March 2005. prepare an inventory that includes everything except 0384AM and estimate values. At the same time ask Kruse to prepare their own inventory to auction the whole lot but telling them 0384AM is not for sale. In August 2005. Sell everything at the Kruse to auction but ignore the value that was actually realised from the sale. In December 2005. Settle the value of the estate with the Probate Court. In October 2006. Having settled the estate then "pass the Ferrari through probate" by applying for the transfer of 0384AM, including the priceless DNA parts as Joe calls them, having told your client not list them as part of the estate in the first place. This hogs wash my be swallowed by Joe and his cheer leaders but any objective thinking person, including Justice Flaux they will see it for what it is and it also explains the desperate last ditch attempt to get an injunction stopping the title claim being heard in London. Kim Image Unavailable, Please Login
I just read more closely Joe Ford's post from yesterday and it appears he already had retracted a key point of his previous breast-beating in this thread: The significance of this statement is that it admits that each effort on the part of Ford and Lawson, to cause the Hamilton County Circuit Court to issue a Certificate of Title to #0384, was fraudulent and that each Certificate Title that was issued is a nullity. I think Joe's friend The Board could already see this, on the basis of the perjured representation that Kristi Lawson and her expert probate attorney Joseph Rouse made to the Court in October 2007, that "the undersigned, fiduciary of the estate, represents that s/he is in possession of the following described motor vehicle belonging to the estate: 1955 . . . Ferrari . . . No. 0384AM." There is no ambiguity in that perjured, fraudulent statement, and The Board probably already saw this. But it is good nonetheless to see Joe Ford's public repudiation of the perjury of Lawson and Attorney Rouse. OK, that's too heavy on the internet rat-a-tat gotcha bull poop. On a more sober level, the absence of a legally effective transfer of Karl Kleve's alleged contingent ownership interest in #0384 is a real problem that is not going to go away. Currently that contingent ownership interest seems to me to be floating out there in a legal limbo. This asset should have been included in Kleve's probate estate. But thanks to the ministrations of Lawson and another of her expert probate attorneys, Christopher Skufka, this never happened. Review the Amended Inventory attached to one of my posts from yesterday, May 29. Page 1 has line items for real property, tangible personal property, and intangible personal property. One would expect Karl Kleve's contingent claim to ownership of #0384 to fall into the third category, intangible personal property. Pages 3 and 4 of my attachment break out the intangible personal property into a number of bank accounts and a brokerage account, with a total value of $182,000. No mention of a contingent claim to ownership of #0384. (Recall too that Ford has claimed repeatedly that the value of Karl Kleve's interest in #0384 was worth $3 million! It's quite an oversight to have left this item out of the Kleve estate's invenory.) Now I'm just a California "insurance attorney," not an Ohio probate super lawyer. So I don't know for sure if the absence of any mention of an asset, consisting of Karl Kleve's contingent claim to ownership of #0384, means that the probate court lacked the jurisdiction to transfer ownership of this asset to Kleve's heirs. But I suspect that it does. If my suspicion is correct, then Lawson lacks any standing whatsoever to pursue any relief whatsoever with respect to #0384. And I am more than suspicious, I am certain, that title to a contingent ownership interest in a car falls well short of title to the physical car itself. In the absence of title to the car, much less actual possession of the car, Lawson did not qualify for the issuance of a Certificate of Title to the car. This renders a nullity any Certificate of Title that she did cause to be issued to her. But what do I, an insurance attorney from California, know, in comparison to Ford and Lawson and their armies of Ohio super lawyers?
