The six-year legal battle over pop superstar Prince’s estate has ended, meaning the process of distributing the artist’s wealth could begin next month.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune in the US reports that the Internal Revenue Service and the estate’s administrator, Comerica Bank & Trust, agreed to value Prince’s estate at 156.4 million dollars (£114.3 million), a figure that the artist’s heirs have also accepted.
The valuation dwarfs Comerica’s earlier 82.3 million dollar (£60.1 million) appraisal. The Internal Revenue Service in 2020 had valued the estate at 163.2 million dollars (£119.3 million).
Prince, who died of a fentanyl overdose in 2016, did not leave a will.
Since then, lawyers and consultants have been paid tens of millions of dollars to administer his estate and come up with a plan for its distribution.
Two of Prince’s six sibling heirs, Alfred Jackson and John R. Nelson, have since died. Two others are in their 80s.
“It has been a long six years,” said L. Londell McMillan, a lawyer for three of Prince’s siblings, at a court hearing on Friday.
In the end, the estate will be almost evenly divided between a well-funded New York music company, Primary Wave, and the three oldest of Prince’s six heirs or their families.
The IRS and Comerica settled last spring on the real-estate portion of Prince’s estate. But the trickier task of valuing intangible assets such as rights to Prince’s music was not completed until October.
Taxes on Prince’s fortune will run into the tens of millions of dollars.
