Guma Aguiar. Photo: wiki commons.

The disappearance of Guma Aguiar in Florida has left his mother and wife fighting for control of nearly $100 million in assets, and has now led his uncle’s lawyer to file documents inferring that Aguiar staged his own death.

After Aguair’s boat washed ashore in Fort Lauderdale in June, without him on it, his mother Ellen and wife Jamie began fighting for control of the estate.  The fortune was amassed from the sale of an East Texas gas field in which Guma Aguiar, and his uncle Tom Kaplan, sold their stake for $2.4 billion.

Now, lawyers for Kaplan have filed papers in federal court, urging electronic records from Guma and his mother Ellen to be saved properly because trusts associated with Kaplan “have an interest in determining Aguiar’s whereabouts and the circumstances surrounding his disappearance.”

A Florida court filing shows that Kaplan’s lawyers said “Aguiar disappeared under suspicious circumstances after taking his boat out into the Atlantic Ocean” and “Aguiar’s mother, Ellen Aguiar, has indicated that she believes he may be alive but in a psychotic state.”

Lawyers emphasized their desire to properly secure “any electronic data related to Aguiar’s disappearance, including any electronic communications between Aguiar and Ellen Aguiar.”

A lawyer for Ellen Aguiar said he does not think his client knows where her son is, but that she is holding out hope that he’s still alive.