VOA News | Wednesday, January 17, 2024 
Austrian Heiress Pays to Give Away $27 Million Fortune

VIENNA, AUSTRIA – The rich and famous are paying top dollar for a place at this week’s Davos summit, but heiress Marlene Engelhorn is on the other side of the fence at the glitzy Swiss resort, demanding that they pay more in taxes. The 31-year-old is also pursuing an ambitious plan to pay people to come up with ideas for her to give away the bulk of her $27.4 million wealth so she can escape what she calls a “dynastic rich swamp.” “I’ve inherited a fortune and therefore power, without having done anything for it. And the state doesn’t even want taxes on it,” said the Austrian-German activist and founder of the Taxmenow initiative. Engelhorn is joining several protests by a wealthy minority on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum calling for higher taxes on the rich. The descendant of the founder of BASF chemical giant, Friedrich Engelhorn, is among an exclusive group of millionaires pushing for governments to tax them more to bridge the growing wealth gap. The estimated 2,150 billionaires around the world are $3.3 trillion richer than they were in 2020, while nearly 5 billion people worldwide have grown poorer, the charity Oxfam said in a report on Monday, slamming “levels of obscene inequality.” – Read more