Hello

MHNA Inheritance Crime Consulting is a pioneer and key player in the never-ending fight against inheritance crime. 

This detailed site tells you what we do and how we do it. 

MHNA is a one-off in an unfamiliar field, so we'll be doing some explaining.

It's quite a read, but fighting inheritance crime is quite a subject.

Who we are

MHNA Inheritance Crime Consulting is its founder and CEO, retired London barrister Richard J. Szrabe, working as appropriate with specialist colleagues.

What we do

MHNA treats inheritance crime as crime. 

Except if it involves dishonesty, we're not that interested in breach of trust, breach of fiduciary duty, actionable non-disclosure, actionable misrepresentation, wills law, succession law, estate management law, negligence, breach of contract or any other civil law.

We:-

• predict, anticipate, analyse, expose and process inheritance crime as crime

• do forensic and juridical microscopy on inheritance crime scenes as inheritance crime scenes 

• present irrefutable inheritance crime dossiers to "It's a civil matter" law enforcement as inheritance crime

• assist at every stage of inheritance crime deterrence, prevention, exposure and pursuit using the criminal justice system.

We work globally.

Though relatively youthful as a firm, we are already dealing with cases of inheritance crime of at least $30m. Jurisdictions include England, Switzerland, New York, Lichtenstein, Cayman Islands, France and Cyprus. 

Our workload is bound to increase in the nature of the disease and its increasing ravages.

Why we do it

MHNA is on a mission to treat all inheritance crime as criminal, and to make that approach — with its prospect of actual criminal justice — familiar, attractive and accessible to the public, professionals and law enforcement. 

There is no reason to exempt any inheritance criminal from the fullest criminal accountability.

A criminal justice approach to inheritance crime and criminals is likely to be easier, simpler, quicker, cheaper, more efficient, more effective and more devastating to perpetrators, and less traumatic to victim heirs, than the civil system, with its phony sophistication and its speculative, suspiciously lucrative, all too often corrupt, fastidious, potentially ruinous pit of chance'ry litigation favored by professional litigators and "It's a civil matter" police.

As it gains traction and our methods are seen to work, MHNA's approach will start to change the culture and have a broad deterrent effect.

How we do it

MHNA has a variety of sources, resources, tools and techniques, some discussed on this site. We start by utilising more than twenty years experience of multi-jurisdictional inheritance crime scenes and more than fifty years of familiarity with dishonest lawyers.

We describe our methods in detail on this website.

Our customers

MHNA's services are available to:-

• victim heirs who want to prevent, expose and pursue inheritance crime and see it prosecuted, not litigated

• estate managers (our generic term for executors, interim administrators, full administrators, ad col grantees, etc.) on the lookout for relevant criminality among heirs, lawyers, accountants, asset managers, professional advisers, business associates etc.

• civil lawyers who need forensic help on dishonesty, intent, content and context in relevant tightly focused, tightly controlled, genuinely well-conducted inheritance-related litigation

• criminal lawyers who need comprehensive forensic elucidation of unfamiliar inheritance-specific crime scenes

• police who just don't get it ("It's a civil matter") who might occasionally be disposed to do their job (we can do a lot of it for you; we agree that some inheritance crime scenes, especially multi-jurisdiction and lawyer crime in plain view in a foreign language, looks pretty gosh darn complicated if you don't know what you're looking at. MHNA does know and actually it's probably very simple)

• prosecutors who require a ready-to-eat digestible inheritance crime case on a plate

• accountants and auditors wary of criminal liability by collusively laundering, packaging and selling criminal financial and other data (those releases and disclaimers won't work in criminal court)

• others involved personally, professionally or commercially in any relevant inheritance-related situation.

A new discipline

The field of professional inheritance crime-fighting is:-

• undeveloped

• underdone

• fraught with misunderstanding and dysfunction among the public, the legal profession, the judiciary and law enforcement

• a public scandal, or rather a collection of scandals.

MHNA means to change that:-

• We dislike on principle the idea that an estate is a carcass to be criminally picked clean by family, friends, lawyers on all sides, estate managers, judges, accountants etc., while police and public prosecutors stand by and call it a 'civil matter'. Billions of dollars, pounds etc. are endangered by the twin epidemics of inheritance crime and dereliction of sworn public duty. Your inheritances and your estate are at risk from both

• we aspire to the routine detection, exposure, stamping on and stamping out of inheritance crime using crime-fighting tools and the criminal justice system

• we wish to contribute to establishing and developing a new scientific discipline of inheritance crime fighting. Professionals in this new business will know its deep detail, peculiarities and nuances to a certainty. Victim heirs will feel protected, not:-

  • diminished by the police with their "It's a civil matter" nonsense, all the better to then be…

  • exploited by chance'ry litigators. MHNA does assist on the civil side in appropriate cases. We do deal with dishonesty justiciable in the civil law system such as fraudulent breach of fiduciary duty, fraudulent breach of trust, deceit, conversion etc. But we don't want to see victim heirs wasting their lives courting a Jarndyce-style chance'ry division of their inheritance in relation to inheritance crime that can and should be processed in the criminal justice system

• our resources include:-

  • the incipient MHNA-led Global Inheritance Crime-Fighting Network (it won't materialise overnight)

  • MHNA's open-access database, catalogue and public register of inheritance crime situations

• we have various proprietary tools and techniques we won't go into

• using common sense, business sense, experience, case studies, facts, law, people, issues, problems, situations, relationships, transactions, combinatorics, set theory, AI, etc., we've identified thousands of generic ways in which professional and other inheritance criminals — individuals and gangs in various combinations, locations, jurisdictions, estate setups and at various junctures — can commit inheritance crime (and how local law enforcement worldwide will dismiss all of it as 'a civil matter'). We can tell you more or less immediately exactly where your inheritance crime fits multi-dimensionally, and what to do about it.

Unravelling a mess

We have no idea why treating inheritance crime as criminal should be difficult. We can explain why it is difficult. The situation takes a bit of unravelling. (We venture to suggest that the whole subject is a bit of a mess; and this doesn't take into account the unknowns of the criminal trial even when you've mastered both the subject and the case.)

Most fundamentally, MHNA's resolve to thrust inheritance crime into the criminal justice system comes up against active and interactive resistance from the very communities — four of them — we are trying to help:-

• civil lawyers

• criminal lawyers

• victim heirs

• law enforcement.

Each community behaves dysfunctionally. 

Those four communities

MHNA offers consulting and practical assistance, as well as courses and education, for all of them and many others. And see MHNA founder+CEO Richard J. Szrabe's forthcoming books on inheritance crime.

Let's get started.

Civil lawyers:-

• generally favor civil law and practice (When did you last hear a civil lawyer turn down a case with "It's a criminal matter"?)

• give victim heirs the false impression that torts are the same as crimes

• don't give the uninformed victim heir holistic information or advice about the most elementary fundamentals of the civil and criminal justice systems (they are separate, must be considered separately, are never synonymous and almost never overlap), or any directly or indirectly relevant criminal-law contacts

• have little or no expertise or experience in criminal law practice and for all their advertised implicit prowess specifically in invented crime and invented hybrid crime and invented actionable hybrid crime are not inclined to diversify into it, including the invented hybrid crimes featured in their own advertising

• invent crimes. The insinuation in your advertising is that 'inheritance theft' is a crime. By what law, exactly? Ditto 'inheritance hijacking'. What is 'inheritance hijacking' exactly, and what law criminalises it?

• invent hybrid crimes. A civil lawyer advertising his prowess in handling by civil means the (invented) criminal offense of 'inheritance theft' is insinuating that that specific offense not only exists (unless it exists, it doesn't exist) but can and positively should be dealt with —  even though a (hybrid) crime, perhaps dealt with only — civilly (not unless the offense exists and the criminalising law says that it's not criminal). Except in the case of a statutorily expressly hybrid offense that does exist, whoever heard of suing anyone for theft?

• represent that it is appropriate to not prosecute a non-existent offense that is also a non-existent hybrid offense but to sue on it

• represent to the multiple victim —  of inheritance crime and now the civil lawyer's misconduct, with more to come —that they will sue on a non-existent offense that is also a non-existent hybrid offense. How exactly do you propose doing that? 

• misrepresent their practice and intentions:-

  • You know, but your mark does not know, that your practice does not extend to either prosecuting or litigating any crime, real or invented, hybrid or not

  • Maybe you'll eventually confess that what you're doing or proposing to do has absolutely nothing to do with any crime, criminality or criminal law process — that you propose to deal with this invented crime and its invented hybridness not by prosecuting or litigating it but by suing on it not as a crime but as a tort, and only by using as yet undisclosed not-criminal not-hybrid civil law (conversion, deceit, trespass to goods, breach of fiduciary duty, breach of trust, civil fraud etc.)

  • Your mark is going to find himself litigating a tort when he thought from your false advertising that you were going to prosecute or litigate a (not-hybrid) crime

  • You'll try to get out of your own mess by feeding him more nonsense, such as "What we propose is called something else technically if you must know, and has nothing to do with any crime, and it's all civil, and the policeman was absolutely right about it all being a civil matter, but for us it's really inheritance theft, I assure you, and we and you are going to sue for inheritance theft. Leave it to us." 

  • That's right: never disclose to your now multiply victimised victim the exact not-criminal not-hybrid cause(s) of action. Let him go on thinking that you, a fabricated specialist, are indeed suing on a fabricated-hybrid fabricated crime called 'inheritance theft'. Which is it so far? (Five or six deceptions so far on the victim heir by his own lawyer, in addition to the inheritance crime, with lots more to come because everyone is now in a hole and there's no way out.)

• especially like mis-named 'probate court' mis-named 'probate litigation' (if it has nothing to do with probate), and chance'ry litigation: it pays better than prosecuting (if we're in a jurisdiction in which the civil lawyer or his firm can do that directly or indirectly)

• like it when the (say) estate manager criminal starts criminally threatening to sue or suing the victim heir for something preposterously criminal and criminally preposterous. Rather than forcing that situation out of the civil system altogether and into the criminal system (a very imperfectly understood process that can be done by the right people, if you can find them), the victim heir's civil lawyer welcomes the criminal litigation for the fees etc. and will now start deeply digging the victim into this new hole. The victim heir, already multiply victimised, is now at grave risk of further victimisation from the opposition and his own civil lawyer, and it has only just started. (Let's ask some civil lawyers what they have done, and would do, in this situation…)

Prosecution-side criminal lawyers:-

• don't know enough about relevant inheritance-related factual events, incidents, episodes and sagas to be credible or effective in cases of intricate multi-jurisdictional multi-succession multi-million-dollar inheritance crime, especially when being committed in plain view right under your nose but undetectable unless you know exactly what you're looking at (especially true of inheritance crime by estate managers and their lawyers, and by the victim heir's own lawyers). Inheritance is not an ingredient in a particular crime unless the criminalising statute explicitly says otherwise. But inheritance facts are very relevant to how, when, where, by whom and against whom a relevant crime is committed. You risk missing them every time

• will tend to miss inheritance criminality's relevant civil law: we are not saying that civil law is irrelevant. Criminally obtaining, retaining, invoking and purporting to exercise a court appointment as estate manager, for example

• knowing that they are not fully equipped intellectually, will take the case or decline it. How does this dysfunction assist the victim heir?

• Practice note: it's probably easier and quicker to coach a generalist criminal lawyer about inheritance specifics than to train a chance'ry lawyer about crime.

Victim heirs, all too often the target estate's first and last line of defense:-

• don't put up a fight when law enforcement tells them "It's a civil matter" 

• don't understand the most elementary differences between civil and criminal law, civil and criminal misconduct, the civil and criminal justice systems, litigating and prosecuting, and between genuine specialists and jackass opportunists

• don't bother to inform themselves of their concurrent, consecutive and alternative civil and criminal process options

• labour under the false impression that litigating civil misconduct is the same as or equivalent to prosecuting criminal conduct

• are systematically misinformed about both the civil and the criminal systems by both civil lawyers and law enforcement, each dragooning the victim away from the criminal system by claiming, each for their own improper reasons, that patently obvious genuine real inheritance crime (averred one way or another by the civil lawyer in his advertising, disavowed by law enforcement when deigning to talk to the victim complaint) is not criminal, or cannot or should not be prosecuted

• think mistakenly that there are crimes called 'inheritance theft' and 'inheritance hijacking' which must be dealt with in the civil system by civil lawyers pretending to litigate crime

• are easily flattered, baited, lured and landed by unscrupulous coffin-chasing lawyers selling fancy misrepresented, badly planned, badly conceived, badly executed chance'ry litigation

• are particularly confounded by civil lawyers' unexplained, deliberate, incongruous, irrelevant marketing averments of multiply irrelevant imaginary hybrid and not-hybrid criminality to be litigated

• are likely to end up unwittingly in civil court — highly gratifyingly to both opportunist civil lawyers and dysopportunist law enforcement, neither of whom wants the criminal case

• are in for what they deserve: big bills from all sides, a lot of worry and uncertainty, and no closure

• maybe do understand that by going to a civil lawyer, especially in a jurisdiction where private prosecutions are not known and where law enforcement has already given him the heave-ho, he's in for litigation, not prosecution. Maybe it really is clear to you that 'inheritance theft' is the civil lawyer's improper, inappropriate, unprofessional, misleading, deliberately confusing euphemism for various actionable misconduct and that you'll never see the right side of the inside of a criminal court, and that all of that is just gee swell and your fancy specialist civil lawyer knows what he's doing so let him get on with it. MHNA begs to suggest that such dysfunction is not the correct way to go about it

• are comprehensively uninformed, misinformed, bewildered, cowed, disoriented and dumbfounded to the point of being morally and intellectually unfit to manage their own inheritance-related affairs.

Police and public prosecutors (private prosecutors are motivated entirely differently) have their own explaining to do:-

• there's no culture of treating or even recognising intricate inheritance crime as either crime or criminal. You're supposed to treat this particular species of crime as criminal, go after it and prosecute the criminals, especially lawyers

• there's no specialty of doing any of that. You're supposed to meet the relevant standard of specialist professional competence specifically in the field of inheritance crime

• you have a thing (to repeat yet again) about making trenchant dishonest grandiose irrelevant pronouncements of irrelevant expertise (which you have invented) in irrelevant law that doesn't exist and irrelevant civil process that doesn't exist:-

  • "It's a civil matter" — concerning the same misconduct that the civil lawyer avers, with intent to mislead and confuse, is criminal 'inheritance theft', possibly hybrid — is not only irrelevant, inaccurate, disingenuous, discourteous and always dishonest (however much it gets you off the hook and assists civil lawyers). It annoys us and distresses the victim heir

  • You declare and or opine — dishonestly averring relevant pertinent civil law expertise and its relevance, and dishonestly disavowing criminal law functions, duties and responsibilities — that patently obvious genuine real criminality is not crime at all (cf. the civil lawyer's invention of crime that really isn't crime) and can only be dealt with civilly, or that it is a peculiar type of hybrid crime that can, should and must be dealt with only civilly. All this is monstrous

  • We'd be pleased if you would do your job, without pretense, invention or evasion, in a way that squares with your sworn public duty. MHNA can do a lot at every stage to help you (and you won't lose face). No more "It's a civil matter" when presented with genuine inheritance crime. (If you really don't get that the same facts can give rise to criminal as well as civil liability; that torts and crimes are different; that civil and criminal process in relation to the same facts can be pursued concurrently and or consecutively, and the essentials of the most complex and intractable inheritance crime scene especially involving lawyer criminals, you really shouldn't be in this business.)