A YOUNG woman, who is set to inherit tens of millions, has said she does not want to keep the fortune but would rather give up to 95 per cent of it to charity.
Marlene Engelhorn, 29, is a partial heir to the famed German Engelhorn family's $4.2 billion-dollar fortune following the death of her grandmother.
Marlene said she does not want to keep her inheritance, claiming discovering her grandmother had decided to leave her this fortune did not make her happy, but rather it annoyed her.
“It should not be my decision what to do with my family’s money, for which I did not work,” Marlene told Vice News. “Managing that heritage takes a lot of time. That is not my life project.”
Having known about her inheritance for two years, Marlene said she had time to think about the best option for her and she has decided to give the money away to charity.
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Her reasoning? The fact that she did not work for any of that money.
“This is not a question of will, but of fairness,” Marlene said. “I have done nothing to receive this legacy. This was pure luck in the birth lottery and pure coincidence.”
At a Millionaires for Humanity event in August in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Marlene told the audience: “I am the product of an unequal society […] Because otherwise, I couldn’t be born into multimillions. Just born. Nothing else.”
The young woman, who lives in Vienna, Austria, has been calling for structural change in how the ultrarich are taxed and co-founded a group called Tax Me Now.
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The group has been campaigning for governments to take a much larger share of inherited wealth, arguing that these unearned fortunes should be democratically allocated by the state.
Marlene said she believes a more equitable redistribution of wealth and higher taxes on the super-rich could help rebalance society.
When asked what her future looks life after giving up 90 to 95 per cent of her wealth, the student said: : “I do not know that yet. But I want to work hard. As does everyone else.”
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Marlene is the granddaughter of 94-year-old Traudl Engelhorn-Vechiatto, a member of the German industrial family whose patriarch, Friedrich Engelhorn, founded BASF, the largest chemical producer in the world, in 1865.
While BASF sold for $11 billion in 1997, Marlene’s grandmother received $2.45 billion. The fortune grew to $4.2 billion, at the time of her death, earlier this year.
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