Family fortunes (original) (raw)

If Sigrid Rausing had been given three wishes as a young girl they would have been to end world hunger, create world peace and have hundreds more wishes to make the world a better place. Now, as arguably one of the world's wealthiest women, she is in the enviable position of being able to try to make them come true.

Her charitable trust gives away about £10m a year to human rights organisations, women's groups, social and economic regeneration agencies and environmental causes, and claims to be Britain's largest philanthropic funder of groups supporting women. Last year, it awarded 36 grants totalling £2.7m specifically to help women escape from poverty and violent relationships.

The wealth - a £4.9bn fortune - derives from the family's Tetra Pak drinks carton manufacturing company. After her father, Hans, sold 50% of the business to his brother in 1996, the family became the richest in Britain; a title that is now held by Russian billionaire and Chelsea football club owner, Roman Abramovich.

Rausing ploughed £60m of her inheritance into the Ruben and Elisabeth Rausing Trust - named after her grandparents. She added a further £50m in 2001. Two years later the trust acquired her name.

Dressed in jeans and a jumper, with no trace of makeup and her only jewellery a gold wedding ring, Rausing does not look like an heiress. Sitting on a sofa in the study used by her husband - film producer Eric Abraham - with Leo, her King Charles spaniel sprawled across her lap, Rausing is softly spoken and her slightly clipped pronunciation only just gives away her Swedish origins. The Rausing family uprooted to Britain from Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden in the early 1970s, and she was sent to boarding school in Oxford.

Rausing doesn't court publicity - she has avoided interviews, partly out of a sense that they are "vulgar". She is speaking now, she explains, to encourage philanthropy support in Britain for the type of projects funded by her trust.

"People give a lot of money to art projects here. I think it would be a very good thing if similar kinds of sums can go into refuges for women and refugee causes. The organisations we support are usually run on a shoestring - it would be a very good thing if their donor base becomes bigger and more affluent, as it is in America."

Refuge, the national charity for women and children experiencing domestic violence, Womankind Worldwide, a London-based international women's development network, and Mama Cash, an international women's rights fund in Amsterdam that makes small grants to grassroots groups, all received in excess of £250,000 from the Sigrid Rausing Trust last year.

The trust gives to issues for which Rausing developed a passion in her youth. "I discovered feminism at university, in York. It seems to me an area of such fundamental importance that women need support," she explains. "And I grew up with refugees fleeing Chile, and the Vietnam war; and the Holocaust made a profound impression on my mother."

Although she will not put a figure on her own personal wealth, Rausing is surprisingly candid about the fraught relationship she has with money. "I grew up being acutely uncomfortable. In the 1960s and 70s, Sweden was very progressive, not a good place to be a capitalist. I spent so many of my teenage years skulking in doorways, hiding away."

In her early 20s, she says, she lived a simple life. There were no shopping sprees or luxury holidays. Even now, she owns only one car, a Volvo.

"I was very paranoid about anyone finding me out," she says. So has she ever sought therapy to deal with her guilt about being so rich? "Yes, I wanted to be who I was and didn't want to hide anything any more. I know people who are emotionally crippled by money they inherited. It does not help anyone."

She appears to have come to terms with her fortune by giving some of it away; £45m to date. "Be open about it and be active with it. It's a responsibility and it's no good avoiding that responsibility," she says.

"It is only when you give it away, or consume, that money transforms from figures on a piece of paper to something in the world."

When asked why she has not thrown all her money at one problem, as Microsoft founder Bill Gates did with his $127m (£69m) donation to combat HIV/Aids, she replies that it rarely works. "Take Aids. Millions of dollars have gone into preventative measures in Africa. This hasn't so far been as successful as people would have wished. The physical means - condoms - to prevent Aids is available, but few use them. Why? Because women don't have the economic power or status to negotiate over sex.

"Safe sex messages don't help them as much as one might have hoped. Women are now being infected with Aids at six times the rate of men. Only by making women more equal partners will Aids be tackled."

Her views on world hunger are similarly women-focused. "Giving girls an extra year of education is the single most productive investment anyone can make in poverty reduction. World Bank research shows that it increases food production more than any other measure."

Until 2002, Rausing ran the trust herself with the help of a personal assistant and two American trustees: social entrepreneur Joshua Mailman and Robert Bernstein, founding chair of New York-based Human Rights Watch, which last year received the largest grant from the trust -£900,000. The trust now has a full-time director, former ITN journalist Jo Andrews. As a result, grant giving is much more disciplined, says Rausing. "I found it very difficult to say no, especially when I was younger," she admits.

Rausing describes herself politically as a liberal. "I believe in some of the welfare state. I believe taxes shouldn't be too high or too low, and that people are best left alone to do their own things."

She divides her time between her Sussex home, the trust's London office, and in the summer escapes to her Scottish estate. But she has chosen not to become a British citizen.

When it was reported in the Guardian that her father was avoiding paying taxes through his "non-domicile" status in the UK, she says she was terribly upset. "I cried and cried", she recalls. "You shouldn't blame someone for following the tax regime in a country. One should blame the government for their rules."

"I pay taxes as a Swedish person does who lives in the UK," she adds. Asked if she would favour a change in Britain's tax laws, she replies: "I don't feel sufficiently qualified to answer that question."

Although Rausing does not propose to give away all of her wealth, she plans to increase her trust's donations to around £15m a year, making her one of the UK's most prolific charity donors.

Luke FitzHerbert, author of A Guide to the Major Trusts, says discovering the Rausings - her elder sister set up the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund, which has donated £20m to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, to preserve endangered languages - was a salutary experience after the parochial and conservative nature of most UK grantmakers.

For Sigrid Rausing, this is a vocation: "I do want to be a philanthropist all my life."

The CV

Age 41

Status Married, with one son

Lives Sussex

Education 1983-86, University of York (history); 1986-87, MSc in social anthropology; 1997, PhD in social anthropology.

Academic career 2004, her PhD, History, Memory, and Identity in post-Soviet Estonia, published by Oxford University Press

Philanthropy 1988, set up the Sea Foundation to give money to charitable causes; 1996, transferred funds to the Ruben and Elisabeth Rausing Trust; 2003, changed its name to the Sigrid Rausing Trust.

Public life On the board of Human Rights Watch, the Whitley Laing Foundation and the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund.