Last Thursday, Alberto Safra asked a court in New York to let him pursue evidence in the US for his challenge. He said his father, who had Parkinson’s disease when he died, lacked the mental acuity to execute three new wills in November and December 2019, Bloomberg reported August 5.

“Mr Safra was under no condition at that time to voluntarily and knowingly make changes to his wills, let alone changes that would deprive petitioner, a devoted son who had loyally served his father for years in the family business, of his rightful inheritance,” Alberto Safra said in court papers filed in a Manhattan federal court, the report continued.

Alberto, 41, is one of the four children of Joseph Safra. The Safras own banks in Brazil, Switzerland and the US, as well as a real estate portfolio that includes the “Gherkin” building in London and a stake in the banana company Chiquita Brands International. The report said that the family’s fortune is estimated at around $16 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Alberto Safra left the board of the family’s Sao Paulo-based Banco Safra SA in 2019. Just weeks after he left, his father “hastily changed his wills in order to cut the petitioner off from his rightful inheritance and, correspondingly, increase the petitioner’s siblings’ share of the late Joseph Safra estate,” according to the court papers.

His siblings oversee the family’s banking empire, with the oldest child, Jacob, in charge of international operations and the youngest, David, overseeing the Brazilian firm. His sister, Esther, is an educator and runs a school in Sao Paulo.

Joseph Safra, a Swiss-Lebanese billionaire, with Syrian ancestry, moved with his family to Brazil as a teenager to build what became a private banking empire. He was a prominent figure in Brazil’s Jewish community, and in later years active globally in philanthropic causes. Building the family business, which extended well beyond finance, was not without family conflict. Sibling rivalry at the top of the bank in 2006 led Safra to pay a reported $2.5 billion for his brother Moise’s 50 per cent stake in Safra Bank, which is Brazil's eighth largest lender.