re: A question about this Benson family issue.

quote:

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If it is an irrevocable trust, why would a legal staff think they could change the rules ? Makes no sense.

Who knows what caused the issues, but I feel for Mr. Benson. He executed a trust in the best interest of the family & created the trust to avoid the outrageous estate taxes for someone with this level of wealth.

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A couple of points.

First, you can draft a trust to say almost anything. But, what drives most trusts of this nature is the estate/gift tax. And, the IRS limits what you can do and still keep the tax advantages wealthy people desire. One of the provisions the IRS has somewhat blessed is the ability to "substitute" assets in an irrevocable trust. And, in some cases, you can even substitute a nonrecourse note. However, you better have more than enough assets to satisfy that note otherwise a trustee would be committing breach of fiduciary duty in allowing the substitution. Here, there was no way in the world that any trustee would do what Benson asked him to do.


Second, there's always a tug-of-war for wealthy people to get as much as possible out of their estates while still maintaining control of their assets. In this case, Benson couldn't "avoid" estate taxes. That would be impossible given his wealth. The reason why he put the Saints/Pels/Other assets in trust is so that any further/future appreciation would stay out of his estate. So, if he put the teams in when their fair market value was $1 billion and the teams are worth $1.5 billion when he dies, he would avoid a flat 40% tax on the extra $500 million. BUT, the billion would still be taxable.

He did this to "help" his family to avoid potentially hundreds of millions in estate taxes, but it's come back to bite him in the a$$. Then again, what Rita, et. al., have alleged about Gayle just might be true -- we don't know.