Dan Duncan died in March 2010. He was not in the donut business and if you didn’t live in Texas you may have never heard of Mr. Duncan. Dan L. Duncan, a soft-spoken man built a network of natural gas processing plants and pipelines that made him the richest person in Houston. It is estimated that he had personal wealth in excess of 9 billion dollars. Mr. Duncan gave more than $100 million to Baylor College of Medicine to build a Cancer Center in Houston. He also was a patron of the arts and conservation causes. Mr. Duncan death has created a lot of attention because persons dying in 2010 will pay no estate tax. Most estate planning attorneys thought Congress would change the law before 2010 and this would never happen. President Obama’s agenda had other priorities and it didn’t happen in 2009 and not so far in 2010. Will Congress change the law retroactively? They have done it before. Will it happen before or after the November elections?
William Wombacher
www.wombacherlaw.com
