There have been a few interesting stories associated with wealth that caught my attention again.
They are interesting because they shine a spotlight on how the super-rich spend money and how absurd their expectations are.
The Assets Forfeiture Unit is fast becoming one of my favourite crime-fighting bodies and they have had their hands full lately.
Last week, they were at it again, this time freezing assets associated with corruption at the National Lotteries Commission, which seems like it became a piggy bank for some executives with long fingers. But I’ll comment on that another day .
Of greater interest to me is the ongoing Steinhoff saga and the implication of his supposed lover Berdine Odendaal, who seems to have collected extreme wealth without any employment or business interests.
Anyway, the Reserve Bank has been onto her, and her bank accounts have been frozen.
But she wants them to continue releasing
R150 000 a month for her living expenses, which is where it gets interesting.
This is a woman who, according to investigators, lived the high life off money looted from Steinhoff.
According to her expenses list, she needs R70 000 for vet expenses, R10 000 for hair and beauty products, but only R4 000 for a domestic worker.
Hard-working people were robbed and exploited while an unemployed socialite owned a polo team, several mansions and six super expensive cars.
The irony here is that one of Steinhoff’s biggest investors was the government pension fund.
One of her cars was a Ferrari, which brings me to a small fender bender that happened in Sea Point two weeks ago. It involved an R8-million Ferrari and a R3m Audi R8.
The owner of the Ferrari, JP van der Spuy, was on my breakfast show on Smile FM last week and was genuinely unfazed by the damages, which he expected to cost him around R5m.
And since the insurance wasn’t going to foot the bill, he even offered to buy the Audi owner a new one, if his car turned out to be a write-off.
These are different levels of wealth that are simply astounding to us mere commoners.
But among all of this ridiculousness, there is at least one shining light of redemption.
It’s a story that comes out of Austria and involves an heiress, who is rightfully disgusted with the opulence that she was born into and didn’t have to lift a finger for.
Thirty-year-old Marlene Engelhorn stands to inherit billions of rands, but acknowledges that it is the result of an unequal society.
Instead of living a carefree life of luxury, she advocates for a wealth tax for the world’s super rich, is part of a movement called “Millionaires for Humanity” and has pledged to give away 90% of her wealth.
She rightfully states that “there are structural links between wealth and poverty, and that radical sharing is beneficial”.
And if her thinking doesn’t catch on, then I’m afraid radical taking by the disenfranchised might be inevitable.