iX ; STAR DELI COMPARE OUR LOW PRICES WITH ANY DELICATESSEN IN TOWN! IS ONE OF THE BEST CARRY OUT ONLY RESTAURANTS IN AMERICA! 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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