The death of Lisa Marie Presley at the age of 54 has left unresolved legal battles over her finances and questions about how she managed to lose the $100 million fortune her father left her.
Presley, whose death was confirmed by his mother Priscilla, was still fighting her fourth and last husband, Michael Lockwood, when she died. Lockwood, father of her twin daughters Harper Vivienne and Finley, was seeking $40,000 a month in child support and insisted he had more money than he claimed in court documents.
Presley, in turn, said that at one point he had a debt of $16 million, following disastrous business deals made by its business manager Barry Siegel. She sued him in 2018, accusing him of mismanaging his estate.
Presley was married to actor Danny Keough, Michael Jackson and Nicholas Cage before Lockwood, but is not believed to have gained financially from her marriages to the King of Pop and the Oscar-winning actor. Elvis’s only daughter, she kept all of his assets in his will when he died in 1977, aged 42.
He appointed Barry Siegel in 2003 to manage the moneythe same year that he launched his own ill-fated music career.
Siegel, a senior managing director at Provident Financial Management and a leading entertainment business manager, counted Al Pacino, Elijah Wood, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet and Frankie Valli and Four Seasons as his clients. But in 2005, Siegel sold his 85 percent stake in Elvis Presley Enterprises, which made her lose control of her father’s name and image rights.
Siegel said the agreement “cleared over $20 million in debt Lisa had incurred, generating over $40 million in cash and a multi-million dollar income stream for her.”
Presley said he lost millions thanks to a later investment in Core Entertainment, the company behind American Idol that went bankrupt in 2016.
He then allegedly began liquidating Presley’s assets to supplement the income from his trust. She also claimed that her business decisions left her with $500,000 in credit card debt.
Presley divorced her fourth husband, Michael Lockwood, in 2016, and in her divorce proceedings she claimed she was $16 million in debt, which Lockwood said was untrue. According to the documents, Presley at the time owed more than $10 million in taxes from 2012 to 2017 and had defaulted on her debt of more than $6 million from her UK home.
She also owed $263,050 in professional releases, $47,844 in credit card debt, and an estimated $250,000 in unpaid miscellaneous bills. Presley disclosed her financial problems in response to a request by Lockwood that she help him pay part of her $450,000 in attorney fees.
In 2018, he sued Siegel, accusing him of mismanaging his finances. Siegel and her company, Providence Financial Management, countersued, alleging that Presley’s “out-of-control spending” led to her financial situation.
Leon Gladstone, a lawyer representing Barry Siegel, said at the time: “It is clear that Lisa Marie is going through a difficult time in her life and is looking to blame others rather than take responsibility for her actions.”
However, Presley insisted that the financial collapse was his fault. “Between 2005 and the time of American Idol’s bankruptcy, Siegel billed $4.9 million to ‘manage’ the trust, a median annual salary of $701,000 a year,” the court documents state.
Yes Siegel would have disclosed the trust’s true financial condition to Presley and restricted spending to the trust’s ‘income’ rather than its core assetsshe would have lived comfortably on an annual budget of between $1.5 and $2 million per year, after taxes.
“With this budget, Siegel’s lucrative compensation package would have amounted to 40 to 50 percent of Presley’s annual after-tax budget, an amount he certainly wouldn’t have accepted had he been aware of his true financial situation. ”.
Instead of telling Presley the truth, Siegel covered up serious financial troubles, his lawyers say. “Siegel repeatedly led Lisa to believe that she was in ‘good shape’ with her finances,” the documents state.
His lawyers cited several emails from Siegel in response to inquiries from Presley about how his trust fund was doing. Presley’s drug treatment over the years has certainly eaten into his bank balances.
He said he was in rehab at least five times, with stints at one site he attended, Hills Treatment Center in Los Angeles, costing $40-50,000 a month. Lisa Marie may have inherited a taste for expensive things.
She built Graceland into a global tourist destination and took advantage of merchandising, image deals, and recorded song royalties after the RCA deal, leaving the trust with $100 million in 1993.
Lisa Marie lived most of her life in Los Angeles, but in 2010 she and her then-husband Lockwood purchased a 15th-century manor house set on 50 acres of rural England in East Sussex. Coes Hall featured an orangery, pond and indoor swimming pool, as well as spectacular grounds including walled gardens, tennis courts and parkland.
He sold the house in 2021 for $4.3 million, after five years on the market. (AND)
Source: Eluniverso
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