Austrian pharmaceutical heiress and descendant of the founder of BASF, Marlene Engelhorn, is making moves to stop wealth inequality.
Engelhorn created a citizens’ group to redistribute her $27.4 million inheritance given by her grandmother, Traudl Englehorn-Vechiatto, who passed away last September 2022.
The heiress has given 10,000 invitations to randomly selected Austrian citizens over the age of 16 to take part in Engelhorn’s Good Council for Redistribution.
The council comprising 50 chosen participants and 15 substitutes will be meeting in Salzburg, Austria from March to June working with academics and civil society organizations.
Each attendee will be receiving $1,300 for every attended weekend for childcare and travel expenses.
She stated that she won the “birth lottery” for inheriting wealth without working for it and has been championing higher taxes on the rich. Back in August 2022, she participated in the Millionaires for Humanity event in Amsterdam that campaigns for increased taxes on the wealthy.
Engelhorn believes that she sees this as an opportunity for scrutiny and redistribution. She pledges to redistribute 90% of her inheritance and spent her time in the last decade campaigning for tax policies that tax and redistribute wealth heavily.
With this, she co-founded Tax Me Now, a collective of rich people in German-speaking countries dealing with the extreme inequality from the tax policies made in 2021.
Engelhorn said, “In Austria, the richest one percent hoards up to 50 percent of the net wealth.”
Austria abolished the inheritance and gift taxes back in 2008 during a time when the United States lacked federal inheritance tax with only a few states imposing these taxes.
In a video posted on Facebook back in 2021, Engelhorn said, “Millionaires should not get to decide whether or not they contribute in a just way to societies they live in. Social justice is in everyone’s best interest. Wealth taxes are the least we can do to take responsibility. Tax us.”
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