BAG BLOOD
Family feud hits designer tipped as envoy
● For years, SA-born handbag designer Lana Marks has rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous. Stars such as Charlize Theron, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Aniston, Helen Mirren and Angelina Jolie have donned her creations on the red carpet, and her bags fetch up to $100,000 (R1.4m).
The globe-trotting businesswoman is also tipped to be the next US ambassador to South Africa.
But behind the glamour is a family feud playing out in the Grahamstown high court.
Marks is embroiled in an ugly spat with her two siblings over control of their parents’ assets, which are worth millions.
She has been accused by her brother Malcolm Bank and sister Anne Pogroske of transferring their parents’ apartment in Trump Plaza in West Palm Beach, Florida, into her name without her siblings’ knowledge. They say the apartment is valued at more than $1m (R14.4m). They also claim she “unlawfully” transferred almost R2.7m from the family trust into her bank account in 2013.
Pogroske told the Sunday Times this week she was “shocked and bewildered” when she discovered her sister had been nominated by US President Donald Trump to become ambassador to SA “because Lana is unscrupulous, dishonest and corrupt”.
“If Lana behaves towards her family in this way, I cannot imagine how she would behave as ambassador if appointed. She lacks the experience and integrity to fulfil this role,” she said.
Bank, a dentist living in Israel, and Pogroske, who is in Australia, claim Marks transferred the Florida property into her name in 2003 after their father, Alec Bank, died in July 1997.
But Marks said this week her siblings “are driven by nothing other than greed and a neurosis that I am in some manner or form reducing their ultimate entitlement”.
Marks has been acting as the de facto trustee for her 89-year-old mother Blanche Bank, who has severe dementia.
Bank and Pogroske have asked the high court in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape to declare their mother incapable of managing her own affairs. They want her replaced as sole trustee of the family’s holding trust, Balam Trust, which owns apartments, commercial shops, factories and offices in SA.
They want a new trustee — approved by at least two of the three beneficiaries — to be appointed.
However Marks, who says she was appointed trustee years ago as “a direct result of her mother’s wish”, has lodged a counter application for her and John Wilson, the husband of a close friend, to be appointed trustees.
Bank says in court documents that “this clandestine effort by Lana to have herself appointed trustee clearly vindicates both Anne’s and my mistrust of Lana and our belief that she desires to seize control of the trusts for her own benefit”.
Bank, who has been granted guardianship of his mother by a family court in Jerusalem, alleges that Marks “engineered a bypassing of exchange control regulations of the South African Reserve Bank to effect the transfer” of the almost R2.7m to her own account.
Describing herself as a “highly regarded international businesswoman”, Marks, who has boutiques in the US, UK, Macau, China, Dubai and Qatar, denies all the allegations made by her siblings.
“I have no ulterior motives,” she says in court papers. “The vitriolic attack on me is unfounded. The fact of the matter is that I have been in de facto control of the trust’s affairs for many years after my mother re- quested me to be appointed as trustee.”
She described the allegation that she wanted to “seize control of the trust” as misplaced and alarming. She denied bypassing the Reserve Bank’s exchange control regulations and said she was entitled to the R2.7m as payment for managing the trust’s affairs.
“During the beginning of 2008 my mother agreed that I would receive 20% of the gross monthly rental income. I am entitled to approximately $540,000.”
According to Marks, she bought apartment 7G in Trump Plaza in 1991 and, after her parents moved to Florida, offered them the unit to live in.
“I agreed to transfer it into my mother’s name on the understanding that one day it would be transferred back to me. Apartment 7G is mine and always has been,” she says.
Speaking from the US, Marks told the Sunday Times that she could not comment on her nomination as US ambassador to SA.