Powerhouse African Joint Wills and Strange Wills

Dr. Precious Moloi-Motsepe & Patrice Motsepe
The Motsepes are South Africa’s richest
black family with a net worth estimated
at over $2.5 billion by Forbes. Quite notably,
they recently announced that they
will follow the footsteps of Bill Gates and
Warren Buffett and donate half of their
wealth to philanthropy efforts.

Maria Ramos & Trevor Manuel

She led the turnaround of South Africa’s
rail transport industry during her tenure
as Group Chief Executive of Transnet
Limited; he spearheaded the country’s
Finance Ministry for over a decade.
Separately, they are both highly respected
in their individual politics and business
sectors, together, Maria Ramos and Trevor
Manuel can quite easily be called
South Africa’s Royal Finance Couple.

Strange Wills

Stranger than fiction: Seventy strangers from a
phone directory It’s the stuff of daydreams and
film scripts. When Portuguese aristocrat Luis
Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara wrote up
his will, he left his considerable fortune to 70
strangers randomly chosen out of a Lisbon
phone directory. “I thought it was some kind of
cruel joke,” a 70-year-old heiress told Portugal’s
Sol newspaper. “I’d never heard of the man.”

Doggone:

In 2004, billionaire hotelier Leona
Helmsley left instructions for her $4bn (£2.5bn)
fortune to be spent caring for dogs, having apparently
re-thought an earlier draft that left it to
the poor. Her nine-year-old Maltese, Trouble,
received $12m (£8m) in the will,. Trouble’s
inheritance was later cut to just $2m (£1.2m) by
a judge, although the dog still needed to go into
hiding amid death and kidnap threats.