Who inherits all of Amy Winehouse's money?
Amy Winehouse is suggested to have left a fortune somewhere between £10 and £20 million. The obvious question is, who is going to inherit that now?
It depends upon whether she left a will and what she said in that will of course. But it's not unlikely that it will actually be Blake Fielder-Civil who gets it all. Yes, who gets Amy Winehouse's money might depend upon the vagaries of English marriage law. Or more accurately, English divorce law.
For the thing is, there's a bit of a hole in the way that the law works. Getting married means that any earlier will is now invalid: it's replaced with the spouse as the obvious person to inherit. However, getting divorced doesn't reverse this situation:
Which is where that little piece of law comes in. Marriage rewrites any will made before the marriage. That “I thee with my worldly goods endow” means just that. Divorce undoes those financial shackles, this is true, and there can be a settlement or not, as the parties agree to. However, the one thing, under English law, that divorce does not do is undo the presumption that the natural inheritor is the spouse. In the absence of a will the surviving spouse will inherit at least the bulk of any estate.
Even in the presence of a will written pre-marriage which states otherwise the surviving spouse, or ex-spouse, will again be the natural inheritor. Only if, and I repeat only if, there was a new will written post-divorce which specifically left the estate elsewhere would Blake Fielder-Civil not be the natural inheritor of Winehouse’s estate.
All of which is rather dark really: that the person who introduced Winehouse to the heavier drugs might have just become a multi-millionaire as a result of Amy's death.
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