In several European countries this is a trick to get around inheritance tax so, if you die several years after the gift, it's taxed as per inheritance.

Yeah. In the UK it is a common trick to back date a gift to your children 7 years so you don't have to pay inheritance tax on it. Sometimes it needs to preparation, you need some sort of evidence that the gift happened 7 years before death, but faking that evidence is far from impossible.