Cross-Border Succession Disputes of Wealthy Families: Lessons from Aucrinde and the Great Fortune Wars

2026-07-19

On 16 July 2026, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice held in Case C-196/24, Aucrinde, that a French court must execute an Italian court’s request for the exhumation of a body buried in France and the collection of a DNA sample, notwithstanding a French substantive prohibition of ordre public rank. Behind the evidentiary dispute lies an inheritance. This article takes the judgment as a point of departure for a broader examination of cross-border succession disputes among wealthy families: the jurisdictional architecture of Regulation 650/2012, the recurring patterns visible in the Agnelli, Johnson, Getty, Pritzker, Lagerfeld and Samsung litigations, and the planning instruments, from professio iuris to the Polish family foundation, that render most such disputes avoidable.

Introduction: A Grave Opened, an Estate at Stake

On 16 July 2026, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its judgment in Case C-196/24, Aucrinde, holding that a French court seised of a request under Regulation (EU) 2020/1783 on the cross-border taking of evidence must execute an Italian court’s request for the exhumation of a body interred in France and the collection of genetic material, even though French substantive law prohibits post mortem genetic identification absent the deceased’s express lifetime consent and elevates that prohibition to the rank of ordre public. The requested court, the Court held, is confined to procedure; the admissibility of the evidence is governed exclusively by the law of the forum, and the catalogue of refusal grounds in Article 16 of the Regulation is exhaustive (see Press Release No 106/26).

It would be a mistake to file the judgment under bioethics. The action pending in Genoa is, in substance, a succession dispute: a putative son seeks the paternal surname and, with it, a position as heir; the recognised children defend the existing devolution. Aucrinde thus illustrates, with unusual clarity, a proposition that experienced practitioners will recognise: in estates with cross-border elements, outcomes are increasingly determined not by the terms of the will but by the choice of the arena in which the contest is fought. Since the admissibility of the decisive evidence, here, proof of parentage, which creates or eliminates a forced heir, now follows the lex fori without any public policy filter at the place of execution, forum selection has acquired an evidentiary dimension. The great fortune wars of recent decades suggest that this lesson has long been understood by those with the most at stake.

The Legal Architecture: Regulation 650/2012 and Habitual Residence

Within the European Union, the framework for cross-border estates is supplied by Regulation (EU) No 650/2012, applicable to successions opened on or after 17 August 2015. A succession is cross-border where the deceased was a national of one State but habitually resident in another, where assets are situated in more than one country, or where heirs reside abroad. The Regulation rests jurisdiction and applicable law upon a single connecting factor: the habitual residence of the deceased at the time of death, understood as the actual centre of the person’s interests rather than a registered address. The testator may, however, elect the law of his or her nationality for the succession as a whole, a professio iuris exercised by testamentary disposition under Article 22.

The design has evident virtues: one court, one law for the entire estate, and a European Certificate of Succession recognised across the Member States. Its vulnerability is equally evident. Habitual residence is a question of fact, and facts can be contested. Where did a person truly live who kept residences in three countries, companies in five, and wintered in Monaco? Upon the answer may turn the competent court, the applicable regime of forced heirship, the validity of succession agreements, and the incidence of taxation. It is therefore residence, not testamentary language, that constitutes the most frequently contested terrain in disputes over great fortunes, as the case studies that follow demonstrate.

Anatomy of the Fortune Wars: Five Instructive Cases

Agnelli: The Decedent’s Residence as the Axis of a Billion-Euro Dispute

The contest over the estate of Gianni Agnelli, the architect of Fiat’s ascendancy who died in 2003, remains pending more than two decades later and is a textbook illustration of the residence battle. His daughter, Margherita Agnelli, challenges the so-called Geneva agreements of 2004, under which she received 1.2 billion euros in exchange for renouncing influence over the holding entity controlling the Exor empire, which today encompasses Ferrari and Stellantis. Her argument is one of pure conflict of laws: the agreements presupposed the Swiss residence of her mother, Marella Caracciolo, whereas the evidence assembled is said to indicate that Marella spent fewer than four months a year in Switzerland, and Italian law, applicable in the event of Italian residence, does not recognise succession agreements of that kind. Proceedings run in parallel in Turin and in Switzerland; according to agency reporting, in April 2026 the court in Thun declared one of the claims brought by John Elkann and his siblings inadmissible for want of Swiss jurisdiction, without adjudicating the merits, while the principal Geneva proceedings continue. The same residence question has, moreover, a criminal-tax dimension: the Italian revenue challenged Marella’s Swiss status, the heirs paid 183 million euros to close the administrative limb of the matter, and the criminal strand against John Elkann remained open as of reports of December 2025. A single question of fact, how many months an elderly widow spent by Lake Geneva, carries the fate of a structure worth billions.

Piasecka Johnson: Testamentary Capacity and Undue Influence

The most celebrated succession dispute with a Polish protagonist illustrates the second classic vector of attack: the will itself. Barbara Piasecka, an emigrant from the Wrocław region employed as a chambermaid in the household of J. Seward Johnson, co-owner of the Johnson & Johnson concern, became his wife and the principal beneficiary of a will disposing of an estate estimated at 400 to 500 million dollars. Six children of earlier marriages contested the instrument, alleging that the 87-year-old testator lacked capacity and that his wife had exercised undue influence while isolating him from his family. The seventeen-week trial before the Manhattan Surrogate’s Court in 1986, involving more than two hundred lawyers and costs exceeding 20 million dollars, ended in settlement: the widow retained approximately 350 million dollars, the children some 12 per cent of the estate. The lesson is perennial: a late-life will that radically disturbs the previously settled devolution is an invitation to litigation whose costs and duration consume a material share of the estate irrespective of the result.

Lagerfeld: A Will, a Cat, and a Contested Tax Residence

The estate of Karl Lagerfeld, who died in 2019, unites nearly every characteristic complication in a single set of facts: a fortune estimated at some 200 million euros; a will passing over relatives in favour of collaborators and models; a disposition for the cat Choupette, which French law does not permit in terms, an animal being incapable of inheriting; and a challenge to the will’s validity by an unidentified claimant, which may open the door to intestate succession by the designer’s nephews and nieces. As The Atlantic cautions, the details of the will and of the actual devolution remain largely unconfirmed publicly. In parallel, the French tax administration is examining whether the designer’s true residence was Paris rather than the declared Monaco; according to press reporting, the potential liability lies in the range of 20 to 40 million euros. Residence thus returns, this time in its fiscal dimension: the same factual matrix that determines the law applicable to the succession determines which State taxes the estate.

Getty and Pritzker: Fiduciary Structures as the Seed of Conflict

The American dynasties supply the lesson on the darker side of fiduciary structures. The division of the Sarah C. Getty Trust, worth 4 billion dollars, following J. Paul Getty’s death in 1976 produced a conflict resolved only in 1985 by a court-driven settlement splitting the trust into four separate funds, with legal costs estimated at 15 to 40 million dollars. In the Pritzker family, which controls the Hyatt chain and more than two hundred companies, the nineteen-year-old Liesel Pritzker sued senior family members in 2002, alleging that assets had been moved into trusts to her exclusion; the 2005 settlement amounted to approximately 900 million dollars in aggregate, some 450 to 480 million for each sibling. The conclusion is not that fiduciary arrangements are pernicious, but that a structure opaque to its own beneficiaries becomes, in time, explosive material: the secrecy that shields wealth from the outside world turns against the family once the founding generation departs. Comparable arrangements are available under Polish law in the form of fiduciary services, and the same transparency principle governs their sound design.

Samsung: Inheritance Taxation as Systemic Risk

The death of Lee Kun-hee, the long-serving chairman of Samsung, in 2020 generated the largest inheritance tax assessment in history: approximately 12 trillion won, some 8 billion dollars at the exchange rate prevailing when payment was completed, under the Korean rate reaching 50 per cent for the largest estates. According to 2026 reporting, the family has completed payment of that liability, spread over years and financed in part by asset disposals. The Korean episode is a reminder of a variable that European families are apt to underestimate: the tax exposure of an estate can threaten the integrity of the wealth more gravely than any dispute among the heirs, and its magnitude is a function of residence and structuring decisions taken, or omitted, during the decedent’s lifetime.

Recurring Patterns

Disparate as they appear, the disputes surveyed resolve into three recurring patterns. First, the axis of the conflict almost never lies where the layman would seek it: not in the wording of the will, but in preliminary questions such as the decedent’s actual residence, the validity of agreements ancillary to the succession, or the competence of the court. Secondly, parallel proceedings in several jurisdictions are not a pathology but a strategy: each party anchors the dispute where substantive, evidentiary or fiscal law favours it, and Aucrinde reinforces that logic by confirming that the admissibility of evidence is a matter for the forum alone. Family conflict over business succession has, moreover, a psychological dynamic of its own, examined elsewhere on the example of the Murdoch family. Thirdly, costs measured in tens of millions and decades of litigation are borne by all participants regardless of outcome; the only certain beneficiary of a protracted succession dispute is the legal profession on both sides of the aisle.

Prevention: Succession Planning in Place of Succession War

The common denominator of the catastrophes described is the omission of planning during the decedent’s lifetime. The preventive instrumentarium is well established; it merely requires deployment before the succession opens.

The first step is the deliberate management of the residence connecting factor: coherent documentation of habitual residence, an ordered tax status, and an election of the law applicable to the succession by testamentary professio iuris under Article 22 of Regulation 650/2012. The election costs a single testamentary clause and eliminates the most frequent and most expensive theatre of dispute. The second step is transparency of the structure towards its future beneficiaries: a holding structure or fiduciary arrangement of which the heirs first learn from the case file generates conflict almost mechanically. The third, in the Polish context, is the family foundation under the Act of 26 January 2023, which separates the ownership of assets from their beneficiaries, fixes the rules of succession for generations ahead, and extinguishes a substantial part of forced heirship claims; assets contributed to a Polish family foundation do not form part of the estate, and statutory governance mechanisms perform the function over which the Agnellis and Pritzkers have litigated for years. These instruments belong to the broader discipline of asset protection, of which succession planning is arguably the most neglected branch.

It is certain that no instrument eliminates the risk of dispute entirely; it is probable that the full complement of the measures above eliminates its most expensive scenarios, for it removes the preliminary questions upon which such litigation feeds. The cost of omission is illustrated by the figures in the cases described; the cost of planning is a fraction of a permille of the wealth concerned.

Conclusion

Aucrinde completes a certain logic: within the Union’s integrated legal space, succession disputes are won at the stage of forum selection, choice of law and asset architecture, not in the courtroom. The histories of the Agnelli, Johnson, Getty, Pritzker and Lagerfeld fortunes show what becomes of wealth when those decisions are taken too late or not at all. Cross-border succession is today a discipline in its own right, at the intersection of succession law, conflict of laws, taxation and procedure; to treat it as a testamentary formality is arguably the most expensive mistake a wealthy family can make.

Skarbiec Law Firm advises families with assets and heirs in multiple jurisdictions: from residence audits and choice of law, through holding architecture, to the establishment and administration of Polish family foundations, within a broader strategic advisory practice. The point of entry is a paid opinion covering the structure of the estate, the beneficiaries, the time horizon and the risks, with a recommendation of further steps; the fee for the opinion is credited towards subsequent engagement.

The law is stated as at 17 July 2026. Facts concerning pending proceedings (Agnelli, Lagerfeld) and events of 2026 are given as reported in the press sources indicated; those proceedings remain subject to change.