Matters have been further complicated by jurisdictional issues, with the Swiss courts ruling on the validity of the will (finding it invalid) and the English courts getting involved in the trust dispute. The English court considered the trust matter only last week, finding that “there is no evidence of any actual trust.”
Commenting on the dispute after the ruling, Sir Peter’s son-in-law Malcolm Rennie the Daily Telegraph, “I would be surprised if there is anything left in the estate.”
View article on The Telegraph website
Badly drawn up will and defective Trusts leave Peter Ustinov beneficiaries with nothing.
When Sir Peter Ustinov died in 2004 aged 82, he left assets worth tens of millions of pounds. It is now feared that his estate has been largely eroded as a result of a nine-year family dispute over the validity of Sir Peter’s will, written in 1968 and amended subsequently by codicil in 1970.