A battle is brewing over a $100 million fee submitted by the executors overseeing the estate of “Queen of Mean” hotel magnate Leona Helmsley.
Lawyers for New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman asked a judge Thursday to reject the fee as “exorbitant, unreasonable and improper,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
They argued in court papers that the fee is equivalent to a rate of more than $6,400 an hour, the paper reported.
“This extravagant sum bears no factual relationship to the actual value of the work they performed,” Assistant Attorney General Carl Distefano said in the court papers, according to The New York Post.
He proposed a more reasonable fee of $10 million.
Helmsley died in 2007 and in her will left $12 million to her dog Trouble. He eventually got $2 million. The bulk of her $4.8 billion estate was left to charity.
She went to prison for tax fraud and had a reputation for mistreating her minions, the Journal reported.
The executors of her estate are two grandchildren, an attorney and a business adviser.
They defended the $100 million bill, the Journal reported. They said Thursday that they administered an “extraordinarily complex estate…in the face of enormous risks.”
Helmsley’s vast real estate holding included the iconic Empire State Building.
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