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Trustee Accounts
"The dormant accounts scandal has
come and gone, but during that time,
the subject of trustee accounts came
up," says Epping, 54, an American and
Swiss citizen who has lived in Europe
for some 20 years. "Usually, a trustee
was a respected member of the finan-
cial community, a lawyer or business
partner the family had been working
with over many years.
"Nobody knows how many of these
trustee accounts were opened, but
the whole point of the trustees was to
keep the banks out of the loop. The
idea was that if the banks were ever
required to give lists of client names,
as they did in Austria, the families'
names would never appear on the
lists.
"It was legal in Switzerland, all the
way into the 1990s, to open accounts
in one person's name for the benefit
of another. The practice was only
At the time the accounts were estab-
lished, the numbers of deaths were
not anticipated.
"Some people think that trustees
just stole the money, but I have to say,
after working in Swiss banking for a
long time, I would not associate cat-
egorical dishonesty with the Swiss:'
maintains the author, who has a
degree in international finance from
Yale. "It was not easy trying to find
people displaced during the fighting."
Epping believes that accounts
maintained by conscientious trustees
could have grown from thousands to
millions of dollars.
"I recently went to see Stuart
Eisenstadt, who was in charge of
retrieving assets stolen from Jewish
families by the Nazis," Epping says.
"He agreed that the trustee accounts
still had not been dealt with. There
might be many of these accounts, but
nobody knows how many because the
agreements were private
matters?'
As he tours with his
book, Epping informally
advises people who think
their relatives might
have established trustee
accounts. He suggests
a search starting point as looking
through personal papers and photos
for names of possible trustees.
"If a person's family had some
contact in Switzerland, then that
person should access current Swiss
phone listings to see if the contact is
still around just as the character in
my book did:' the author says. "If the
contact is not found, there might be
heirs. If the account was being prop-
erly managed by an honest trustee,
then it's still there."
While Epping works on a sequel
to Trust, he can look back on a real
success.
"We did get the buildings for the
family from Budapest, but the fam-
ily sold them," Epping says. "After
60 years of Communist neglect, the
buildings had declined and were
not worth much. Everybody got a
check, but it really wasn't the money
that mattered. It was a moral victory
for the family to get back what the
Germans took away." ❑
Accounts could have grown
from thousands to millions
of dollars.
stopped because Switzerland was corn-
ing under pressure for making it too
easy for people like drug dealers and
corrupt officials to put their money in
Switzerland."
Epping, who has written books on
international finance and economics,
was in the midst of writing a very
different fictional thriller when he got
the idea for Trust. A Jewish family,
originally from Budapest, had hired
him to track down documents neces-
sary to regain ownership of buildings
seized by the Germans.
"While I was working in the
archives of the Jewish Center of
Budapest, which was the storehouse
of most of the documents for Jewish
families before World War II, the
people working there got to know
me and started telling me stories:'
Epping says.
"I had come to know more about
this family, living in the U.S., Canada
and Brazil, and asked if I could use
their story in the context of the novel.
I changed the name and details, but
the essential story is the same."
Millions Of Dollars
The big question Epping wants to
address has to do with what trust-
ees did with the funds when family
members did not survive the war.
Charles Epping will give a
presentation, before signing
books, 7 p.m. Tuesday, July
25, at Borders, 30995 Orchard
Lake Road, in Farmington Hills.
(248) 737-0110.
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