A warning on IHTA property tycoon has warned about the dangers of trying to avoid inheritance tax by passing on wealth early after a family dispute led to his children banning him and his wife from their own home.
Manny Davidson, 84, said that Lyegrove House, the 18-acre Jacobean estate where he and his wife lived for two decades after buying it in 1993, had been put up for sale for £12 million against his will by his son Gerald and daughter Maxine.
The children had been registered as the owners of the grade II listed home in Old Sodbury, South Gloucestershire, in an attempt to avoid a large tax bill on Mr Davidson’s death. He also set up a trust fund for them in 1967, which is now worth £600 million.
In recent years the relationship between the children and their father has broken down and they have begun legal proceedings to try to change the structure of the family trust and remove their parents’ power to appoint new trustees, as well as putting Lyegrove House up for sale.
Last month Mr Davidson’s wife, Brigitta, flew back from Monaco, where the couple have lived since 2013, for a final look at the stately home. She was told that she could not enter the grounds on her children’s orders.
Mr Davidson, a property magnate who sold his stake in Asda Property Holdings for £253 million in 2006, said that the situation should serve as a warning to those looking to pass their wealth on to their offspring. “The children are very well off. They don’t need any more and they don’t deserve any more,” he told The Mail on Sunday. “I have been kicking myself that I ever set up the trust fund in the first place.”
He said that he had given the money to his children to avoid inheritance tax on his death but now regretted his decision. “If I had my time again, I would pay only for their education and a first home,” he said.
“After that I would not give them any more. They would have to fend for themselves. People should not worry about inheritance tax. Keep your money and spend it on what you want. When you die, the children will pay 40 per cent tax but they will still have the other 60 per cent,” he added.
Mrs Davidson echoed her husband’s view, describing him as a “wonderful, kind man” who was being mistreated by their children. “He set up a trust for his children to secure for them a life that they might not have managed to achieve themselves,” she said. “If there is a moral to this tale, it is ‘Let your children find their own way’.”
The couple are concerned about the fate of silver pieces, historic artefacts and paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth that decorate Lyegrove House.
Documents filed in the chancery division of the High Court show that Gerald Davidson, 54, and Maxine, 56, accused their father of being “dominant and domineering”. Neither Gerald Davidson, who remains a director of his father’s property company and collects vintage Aston Martins, nor his sister, a freelance art consultant, responded to requests for comment.
The Times London
