An heiress is seeking 50 strangers to help her give away her $27 million inheritance

Marlene Engelhorn, a 31-year-old Austrian pharmaceuticals heiress and descendant of the founder of BASF, Friedrich Engelhorn, is taking steps to address wealth inequality.

Engelhorn has set up a citizens' group to redistribute her $27.4 million inheritance from her grandmother,Traudl Engelhorn-Vechiatto, who died in September 2022.

Engelhorn sent out 10,000 invitations to randomly selected Austrian citizens over age 16 to participate in the Good Council for Redistribution, the Daily Mail reported.

The council, consisting of 50 chosen participants and 15 substitutes, will meet in Salzburg, Austria, from March to June, collaborating with academics and civil-society organizations.

Engelhorn believes the inherited wealth that she obtained without personal effort, deserves scrutiny and redistribution among her fellow Austrians.

She once described it as simply getting lucky in a 'birth lottery.'

(Marlene Engelhorn, who lives in Vienna,)

(In August 2022, Engelhorn was seen campaigning for higher taxes for the wealthy)

'I have inherited a fortune, and therefore power, without having done anything for it, and the state doesn't even want taxes on it,' she said.

Her grandmother, Traudl Engelhorn-Vechiatto, left her an estimated $4.2 billion upon her death in September 2022. Engelhorn had already committed to distributing approximately 90 percent of her inheritance.

Engelhorn is the co-founder of Tax Me Now, a group of wealthy people in Germany who are campaigning for greater taxes on their earnings.

(Friedrich Engelhorn, the founder of pharmaceutical firm BASF)

'If politicians don't do their job and redistribute, then I have to redistribute my wealth myself,' Engelhorn explained in her statement.

'Many people struggle to make ends meet with a full-time job, and pay taxes on every euro they earn from work. I see this as a failure of politics, and if politics fails, then the citizens have to deal with it themselves.'

The dream scenario is I get taxed,' Engelhorn told the New York Times in 2022.

(In a video posted by Millionaires for Humanity on their Facebook account in May 2021, Marlene Engelhorn said: 'wealth taxes are the least we can do to take responsibility.')

Ref: An heiress is seeking 50 strangers to help her give away her $27 million inheritance (businessinsider, dailymail)