Susanne Klatten

Susanne Klatten
Born Susanne Hanna Ursula Quandt
28 April 1962 (1962-04-28) (age 54)
Bad Homburg, Germany
Residence Bad Homburg[1]
Citizenship Germany[1]
Education IMD-Lausanne (MBA)
Known for holdings in Altana and BMW; richest woman in Germany
Net worth Decrease US$18.5 billion (June 2015)[1]
Spouse(s) Jan Klatten (m. 1990)
Children 3 [1]
Parent(s) Herbert Quandt (1910–1982)
Johanna Quandt (1926–2015)
Relatives Stefan Quandt (brother; b. 1966)

Susanne Klatten (born Susanne Hanna Ursula Quandt on 28 April 1962) is the daughter of Herbert and Johanna Quandt. As of August 2015, her net worth is US$19.6 billion, and she is the richest woman in Germany and the 38th richest person in the world.[2]

Education

Klatten was born in Bad Homburg, Germany. After gaining a degree in business finance, she worked for the advertising agency Young & Rubicam in Frankfurt from 1981 to 1983.[3] This was followed by a course in marketing and management at the University of Buckingham, and an MBA from IMD in Lausanne specialising in advertising.

She gained further business experience in London with Dresdner Bank, the Munich branch of management consultants McKinsey and the bank Bankhaus Reuschel & Co.

Recognising that her wealth is sometimes a problem, she often worked incognito under the name Susanne Kant.[4]

Investments

On her father's death she inherited his 50.1% stake in pharmaceutical and chemicals manufacturer Altana.[1] She sits on Altana's supervisory board and helped transform it into a world-class corporation in the German DAX list of 30 top companies. In 2006 Altana AG sold its pharmaceutical activities to Nycomed for €4.5 billion, leaving only its speciality chemicals business. The €4.5 billion was distributed to shareholders as a dividend. Altana maintained its stock exchange listing and Klatten remained its majority shareholder. In 2009, she bought almost all shares she did not already own in Altana.

Her father also left her a 12.50% stake in BMW.[1] She was appointed to the supervisory board of BMW with her brother Stefan Quandt in 1997.

German graphite maker SGL Group said on 16 March 2009 that Klatten owns options to raise her stake in SGL from 8% to almost a quarter of the shares but no more than that.[1]

She owns an approximately 25% stake in German wind turbine manufacturer Nordex and, in 2012, bought stakes from Dutch biotech company Paques and used oil recycling company Avista Oil of Germany.[5]

The Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Award winning documentary film The Silence of the Quandts[6][7] by the German public broadcaster ARD described in October 2007 the role of the Quandt family businesses during the Second World War. The family's Nazi past was not well known, but the documentary film revealed this to a wide audience and confronted the Quandts about the use of slave labourers in the family's factories during World War II. As a result, five days after the showing,[8] four family members announced, on behalf of the entire Quandt family, their intention to fund a research project in which a historian will examine the family's activities during Adolf Hitler's dictatorship.[9] The independent 1,200-page study that was released in 2011 concluded: "The Quandts were linked inseparably with the crimes of the Nazis"-Joachim Scholtyseck, the Bonn historian who compiled and researched the study.[8] As of 2008 no compensation, apology or even memorial at the site of one of their factories, have been permitted.[7] BMW was not implicated in the report.[8]

Personal life

Police prevented an attempt to kidnap her in 1978.[10]

Susanne met Jan Klatten while she was doing an internship with BMW in Regensburg, where he worked as an engineer. It is reported that during this time she called herself Kant and did not tell him who she was until they were sure about each other,[11][12] but Klatten herself denies the story.[13] They married in 1990 in Kitzbühel and live in Munich.[11] They have three children.[11] She plays golf and skis in Austria. She has been a member of the University Council of the Technical University of Munich since 2005. In 2007 she was awarded the Bayerischer Verdienstorden, the Bavarian Order of Merit. She is one of the biggest donors of the centre-right political party, the Christian Democratic Union.[14]

In 2007 Klatten was blackmailed by Helg "Russak" Sgarbi, a 44-year-old Swiss national who threatened to release materials depicting the two having an affair.[15][16][17] Sgarbi, who was charged with similar blackmail schemes against multiple women, was arrested in January 2009 and brought to court in Germany, where he was sentenced to six years in jail. His accomplice, the Italian hotel owner Ernano Barretta who allegedly filmed Sgarbi and Klatten with hidden cameras, was also arrested and was sentenced in 2012 to seven years in prison.[18]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Susanne Klatten – Forbes". Forbes. March 9, 2011. Retrieved May 11, 2011.
  2. ↑ "Susanne Klatten". Retrieved 2016-07-30.
  3. ↑ Die Quandts by Rüdiger Jungbluth, p. 356, published by Campus.de ISBN 3-593-36940-0
  4. ↑ "The gigolo, the german heiress and a £6m revenge for her Nazi legacy". The Independent. 23 October 2011. Retrieved 11 November 2015.
  5. ↑ "Susanne Klatten Net Worth". TheRichest.com. Retrieved February 20, 2015.
  6. ↑ The Silence of the Quandts (English subtitles, German narration) on YouTube
  7. 1 2 Emma Bode and Brigitte Fehlau (November 29, 2008). "The Silence of the Quandts: The history of a wealthy German family. A documentary film by Eric Friedler and Barbara Siebert". World Socialist Web Site. Retrieved November 15, 2014.
  8. 1 2 3 Paterson, Tony (29 September 2011). "BMW dynasty breaks silence on its Nazi past". The Independent. Retrieved November 15, 2014.
  9. ↑ Bonstein, Julia (December 10, 2007), "Breaking the Silence: BMW's Quandt Family to Investigate Wealth Amassed in Third Reich", Der Spiegel
  10. ↑ "Richest Germans: The Family Behind BMW". Deutsche-Welle. 5 December 2005.
  11. 1 2 3 "Deutsche Welle". Retrieved 3 May 2013.
  12. ↑ Bude, Heinz (6 April 2005). "Aus Liebe zur Sippe". Die Zeit (in German). ISSN 0044-2070. Retrieved 2015-05-25.
  13. ↑ Spiegel Online. 9 September 2015 http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/leute/susanne-klatten-bmw-grossaktionaerin-ueber-ihr-vermoegen-a-1052148.html. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  14. ↑ Von Susanne Klatten geleistete Parteispenden seit 2000; Politische Datenbank Unklarheiten.de
  15. ↑ "German heiress at centre of sex tape blackmail plot". The Daily Telegraph. 31 October 2008.
  16. ↑ "'Swiss gigolo' Helg Sgarbi on trial for blackmailing BMW heiress Susanne Klatten". The Daily Telegraph. 9 March 2009.
  17. ↑ "Trial to Begin for Man Who Duped Germany's Richest Woman". Spiegel Online. 2009-03-06. Retrieved 2009-03-06.
  18. ↑ Bayer, Tobias. "Klatten-Erpresser Ernano Barretta muss in Haft". Welt. Retrieved 29 June 2015.
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