The late One Direction singer Liam Payne left behind money, property and possessions worth more than £24m ($32m) with no known will when he died last year, official records have shown.
Girls Aloud vocalist Cheryl Tweedy, his former partner and mother of his eight-year-old son, Bear, is legally responsible for Payne’s fortune after being named an administrator for his estate. The pair were in a relationship between 2016 and 2018 but did not marry. U.K. rules of intestacy state that a person’s spouse, and then any children they have, are first claim to the estate.
Court documents also show that music industry lawyer Richard Mark Bray has also been given administrator duties. According to the Letters of Administration, the gross value of Payne’s estate amounts to £28,594,888 ($37,956,568). With the deduction of debts and expenses, the figure comes to approximately £24,279,728 ($32,222,598).
Last year (Oct. 16), Payne died at age 31 after falling from a third-floor room at the Casa Sur hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Toxicology tests revealed that before his death, the musician had traces of alcohol, cocaine, and a prescription antidepressant in his body. His cause of death was “polytrauma” from multiple injuries and internal and external bleeding, a postmortem found.
At the BRIT Awards in March, Payne was remembered with a video montage showing a clip from his time on The X Factor and then with One Direction, who won seven gongs at the music awards before they went on hiatus in 2015.
Throughout the mid-2010s, the band became one of the most successful pop acts of all time. Comprising Payne, Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Louis Tomlinson and Niall Horan, One Direction notched four No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200, six top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and billions of streams alongside four sold-out world tours.
After the group parted ways, Payne launched his solo career in 2017 with the Quavo-assisted “Strip That Down,” which peaked at No. 10 on the Hot 100 and No. 3 on the Official U.K. Singles Chart. His debut album, LP1, arrived in December 2019.
