Susanne Klatten is the daughter of Herbert and Johanna Quandt. As of August
2015, her net worth is US$15.3 billion, and she is the richest woman in Germany
and the 54th richest person in the world.
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. 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.
Investments On her father's death she inherited his
50.1% stake in pharmaceutical and chemicals manufacturer Altana. 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. 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.
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. The Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Award
winning documentary film The Silence of the Quandts 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, 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. 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. As of 2008 no compensation,
apology or even memorial at the site of one of their factories, have been
permitted. BMW was not implicated in the report.
Personal life Police prevented an attempt to kidnap
her in 1978. 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, but Klatten
herself denies the story. They married in 1990 in Kitzbühel and live in Munich.
They have three children. 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.
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. 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. See also
List of billionaires References
External links Forbes.com: Forbes World's Richest
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