He considers wealth an injustice and wants the rich to pay more.
The position of Marlene Engelhorn, an Austro-German born in Vienna 30 years ago, would not be surprising if it were not for the fact that she herself is a billionaire.
She will inherit a part of the 4,040 million euros that constitute, according to
Forbes
magazine , the fortune of her grandmother Traudl Engelhorn, who recently died.
Money not subject to inheritance tax, abolished in Austria in 2008. Marlene Engelhorn has always lived in abundance, as she corresponds to the descendant of Friedrich Engelhorn, founder in 1865 of today's multinational chemical company BASF.
But her time at the public university aroused a new concern in her.
She began working for gay rights and dealing with social inequalities.
She later contacted movements of rich Americans who ask for more taxes, such as the Patriotic Millionaires or the Resource Generation.
And last year she helped create Tax Me Now, "an initiative of wealthy people bent on achieving tax justice in Germany, Austria and Switzerland," she explains on her website.
They collect signatures to achieve a deep tax reform.
Engelhorn goes further: he has promised to give 90% of his inheritance to the State, making it clear that "a government that does not apply taxes on wealth will not receive that gift."
In statements to
The New York Times
, Marlene —who refused to speak to EL PAÍS— indicates that more foundations are not needed, but rather “structural change”.
She has had enough of philanthropy, with which members of her class wield a powerful social influence, as she has seen in her family, full of patrons.
His great-uncle Curt Engelhorn took the legal headquarters of the family pharmacist Boehringer Mannheim with him abroad.
When in 1997 he sold it to Roche for 11,000 million dollars, the German Treasury received nothing.
Her great-niece seems interested in repairing that behavior with an initiative that part of the press has received with sarcasm.
At the moment, 61 millionaires subscribe to it, but only 28 give their names, and they share with her, it must be assumed, the certainty of being "the product of an unequal society", as she said in August at a summit organized in Amsterdam by Millionaires for the Humanity, an initiative of the Danish NGO Human Act.
To Antón Costas, professor of Economics at the University of Barcelona and president of the Economic and Social Council, the gesture seems pure "romanticism."
"I see it as an example of altruism and good philanthropy," he says in a telephone conversation.
But he considers that her scope is limited because both she and those who accompany her are
outsiders
within her social class.
Gonzalo Rodés, lawyer and businessman behind the Barcelona Global forum, youngest son of the late businessman and patron Leopoldo Rodés, known as the Catalan Rockefeller, agrees with Engelhorn in defending the inheritance tax, "essential to make the social elevator work," he says by phone.
And he would view the heiress's offer with great respect “if, after giving 90% of her fortune to the treasury, she is forced to leave her mansion to live in a small apartment”.
Rodés also wonders "what leads her to assume that a government is going to manage her money better than herself."
One only has to think of the many airports built in Spain, some of which are in disuse.
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