This requires some consideration

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

On the DNI payments to me, I have nothing to ask, because I never heard of it before your letter and have no idea what it is.

There are no further distributions. That was arranged with Bainco when it became clear to them and us that distributions to the family were almost exhausting the obligatory IRA withdrawals.

On the promissory note, it's up to you what interest you want to charge on the loan. The Trust is basically yours. If you want to leave it this way, that's your choice. We have nothing to talk to Max about it.

We tried to rouse up David, but he never answered our phone calls or other messages, so we never got back in. We'll probably spend a couple of days there later in August. Now we're off to Tucson, then Uruguay for talks and various events with Mujica, then Brazil, back at the end of the month.

Hi,

The promissory note itself defines the interest rate for the loan - our opinion doesn't hold any legal weight on this issue. If your lawyer doesn't think it's clear, would she like to write to Max and explain the problem? We really don't see how we can be of help on this. Since you set up this loan and its terms with the help of Max, who was your lawyer at the time, he's the one who will be able to clarify any doubts. We got involved only to try to explain because we thought you were misunderstanding the terms of the loan, based on what we learned about it.

If what you need is help calculating the amount owed based on the rules detailed in the note, Isabel Scharmer should be able to do that calculation easily, and we suggest you or your lawyer contact her.

No need to respond to this letter. It is simply to provide you with information that you should have. We're busy getting ready to leave for Tucson, and there are some things that I would like to clarify. I have tried to explain some of these things before, perhaps inadequately. I'll partially repeat and amplify.

You seem to have misread my letter. I meant it exactly as I wrote it. I was providing you with information that I thought you should have. There is absolutely nothing personal about it, and it has nothing to do with our personal relations.

You may be misinterpreting one comment: about the loan from the trust. It is true, as I wrote, that I regarded that as a personal, not legal, matter. But it has nothing at all to do with our personal relations. Rather, as I tried to explain, I would never have accepted a loan from within the family if I had understood what was happening. To repeat, I assumed that it would be for a few weeks or at most months, until the Lexington house was sold and I would pay back the loan and as much of the mortgage I chose to. I was willing to accept it as a temporary, very brief, expedient. I would never have agreed otherwise. I did not know that I did not own the Lexington house, and that I was being advised to buy an expensive apartment that I could not possibly afford and to do so with no assets to pay for it. It is quite clear that that made no sense at all, even apart from leaving me with a loan that I would never have agreed to had I been paying attention to the facts instead of relying on advisers.

I looked back over the correspondence, and I didn't find any efforts to provide me with different evidence, either about this (which seems completely straightforward) or about the other things I mentioned, like the strange practice of distributing half of the required withdrawal from the IRA to family, and therefore (with taxes, Wellfleet, management fees for the whole estate) reducing the funds from the IRA to zero before I paid expenses for Alex's medical fees and before I had anything to live on, with the serious tax consequences that entails for further necessary withdrawals along with rapid depletion of the one substantial source of income, there being almost no pension. That's just arithmetic. I don't see what the counter-evidence could be.

I don't know where you are getting information from. I haven't seen anything that suggests that what I have been writing to you is incorrect. If you have received information showing that what I wrote is wrong, I'd surely want to see it. As I wrote once I found out about the seriously mistaken advice I was receiving, and the practices concerning the estate, I began looking at these matters closely to understand the circumstances, which I will henceforth deal with.

I appreciate your concern, but it seems that it is based on incorrect information that you are receiving. You might want to look into that. I've got matters in hand, and can proceed from here, consulting now with a responsible financial adviser.

Anyone who has any information about the estate has been apprised, and has been approached in the appropriate manner. There is no purpose that I can see in any consultation beyond writing.

Sorry if this seems abrupt. Just want to make everything as clear as possible. And again, to make it clear that this has to do with financial matters, past advice and practices, and the situation as it now exists.

The string of letters explains a lot of the dynamic that has been going on for too long and I don't think this is healthy for Noam. The whole situation is totally outrageous and Deborah seems to be strictly following Max's agenda, although being paid by us and now by you (this was the reason I wanted to verify more carefully her invoices and what she was charging us before paying all the invoices she submitted to us -- one of them including hours for studying how to revert copyrights transfer of one book (Who Rules the World) the only one that Noam has legally transferred to me). Is this representing Noam -- to revert the one book a husband has decided to put under his wife's name and charge us for that? Very strange.