The spurned son from a secret romance fights for a $16.2 million inheritance

The courts have blocked an inheritance worth an estimated €14 million ($16.2 million) from an estate belonging to A. F. D., a Spanish entrepreneur who died in 2021. A luxurious 400-square-meter mansion in Madrid, funds in various bank accounts, shares in companies and a hunting estate in the northern province of León are just some the assets being wrangled over.

A 51-year-old man from Eibar, in Spain’s northern Basque Country region (and who prefers to remain anonymous) has laid claim to the fortune after it was proven in court that he is the millionaire’s only biological son, the result of an extramarital relationship never acknowledged by the father. The paternity test emerged 99.9999% positive. The Supreme Court confirmed the results in a ruling in 2022. Still, the inheritance cannot be released due to the fact that the deceased deliberately disinherited his son, who says his father used a legal trick to do so. Now, it is up to the courts to decide who should receive the assets.

The story began with a secret affair in the 1970s. A millionaire bachelor from León got together with a Basque woman and had a child. The child was never recognized by his father, who made every effort to keep the relationship a secret. The mother, however, eventually told her son.

About 10 years ago, the son hired the high-profile lawyer Fernando Osuna to prove the relationship to his father. The Provincial Court of Madrid ruled in his favor, declaring that A.F.D. “is the father of the plaintiff.” The result of the biological test was decisive, despite objections by the defendant, who at first refused to provide a DNA sample, until the judge warned that he would have the grandfather’s body exhumed if necessary.

Once paternity was proven, the son embarked on a legal battle to prove he was the main beneficiary of the inheritance of his biological father, who died in 2021 at 90 and left him out of the will, using a legal trick to disinherit him: “In bad faith, fraudulently, he registered himself as a resident of Pamplona. He rented a 60-square-meter house, a seedy apartment in a marginal neighborhood of Pamplona, while he really lived in a huge luxury house in Madrid,” says the lawyer Osuna, who has won cases against the singer Julio Iglesias and the bullfighter Manuel Benítez, El Cordobés.

“We have managed to expose that ruse, whose sole purpose was to take advantage of the civil regime of Navarre, which allows for the free designation of heirs and the exclusion of a child from the inheritance,” the lawyer explains; this is not the case in other regions of Spain, where children automatically receive a share of their parents’ assets. Osuna hired detectives to prove that the Pamplona apartment was a ploy and that the old man never resided there. “This gentleman never had commercial, family, social or any other type of relations in Navarre,” the Osuna adds, stating that the deceased used this legal ruse to disinherit his son.

The trial to decide the inheritance is scheduled to be heard in April 2026. At stake is a fortune that the tycoon wanted to bequeath to an eye doctor in Oviedo, two religious institutions in León and Zamora, and an executor who, according to Osuna, was assigned a monthly payment of $11,500 in the will.

The old man’s son is demanding that he be declared “sole heir,” and this requires him to convince the court that his father deliberately tried to keep him out of the will. The deceased “always lived in Madrid and did not set foot in Pamplona. The logic is overwhelming. He simply pretended to live in a 60-square-meter apartment in Pamplona with the sole purpose of leaving his son out of the will. It is clear that he tried to avoid his hereditary responsibilities,” says Osuna.

So far, the law has proven to be on the son’s side. All that remains is for the courts to rule in his favor. The estate in León included in the inheritance has been inspected by the Civil Guard’s Nature Protection Service, Seprona, which found a number of abandoned animals as well as collections of weapons, high-value porcelain and works of art, according to Osuna. The son has also learned that his biological father was able to “divert significant sums of money to Switzerland” in order to hide his assets and deny them to his son.

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