Billionaire people who went from being on top to having nothing.
Although many have managed to accumulate large amounts of money in the world, not all have managed to preserve these enormous fortunes.
These billionaires have lost everything due to different causes, such as bad investments, economic recessions or massive cases of fraud. Although there are those who were able to recover after being broke, others never had the same wealth again.
A publication of Business Insider mentions the stories of various characters who fell from the top and failed to recover.
Patricia Kluge
She is a former heir and model who met her second husband, John W. Kluge, on a trip to New York City. With a fortune valued at about $ 4.5 billion and has come to be ranked as the richest man in the United States by Forbes. The two were married in 1981.
After nine years they divorced and she got a large compensation of more than $ 800,000 a year, plus the couple’s extensive Albemarle heritage. Located in the Virginia countryside, not far from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate, Albemarle would be the rise and fall of Patricia Kluge’s wealth.
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The woman invested much of the money from her divorce settlement in her own vineyard. However, during the 2008 housing market crisis, she lost everything and even had to sell her jewelry and artwork at auction.
Kluge auctioned off all of her jewelry and other belongings to try to save herself from bankruptcy. It didn’t work: Kluge filed for bankruptcy in June 2011.
Vijay Mallya
He was a prominent liquor mogul known for his flamboyant lifestyle. He also owned the now defunct Indian airline Kingfisher Airlines.
In your goal of try to keep your airline business afloat, Mallya accumulated numerous debts with the banks, about which they became known in 2012.
Mallya lost most of her fortune after defaulting on his bank loans and fleeing to the UK.
According Business Standard, the businessman is charged with “charges of bank fraud and money laundering estimated at Rs 90 billion, approximately more than $ 1 billion ”. Mallya’s net worth was greatly reduced after filing for bankruptcy to recoup the more than $ 1 billion in funds owed.
Sean Quinn
He was a big investor in industries like plastics, glass, and hotels. He also had a 25% stake in Anglo Irish Bank, which taxpayers had to bail out during the 2008 financial crisis. The government intervened the bank, and thus began the legal problems between the Quinn family and the entity.
He was considered the richest man in Ireland, but eventually lost most of his $ 2.5 billion fortune. At one point, the Irish Bank Resolution Corp., which took over the Anglo Irish Bank, said Quinn owed the bank more than $ 2 billion.
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Later he was charged with contempt of court for trying to Hide your real estate assets from the bank in an effort to avoid paying your debts. Financial Times reported that in November 2011, Quinn claimed his assets were less than $ 53,000 and said he had filed for bankruptcy.
Jocelyn Wildenstein
The socialite and ex-wife of the late billionaire art dealer Alec Wildenstein filed for federal bankruptcy protection. Although she became very wealthy, she came to confess that her monthly income was zero and that he survived with a help of about $ 800 from Social Security and the assistance of his friends and family.
Your financial problems would have arisen starting a divorce agreement with many mistakes. Despite spending most of the more than $ 2.3 billion he received on the divorce, Wildenstein told the New York Post that he had agreed to receive much more.
In addition, they gave him two paintings, one by Diego Velázquez that turned out to be a forgery and another by Paul Cézanne It was sold for a small portion of what it was originally priced at.
Bernard ‘Bernie’ Madoff
He was known as the leader of the largest Ponzi Scheme in the history of the United States. He was considered a veteran of the financial industry, qIt went unnoticed for decades before its eventual disappearance in December 2008.
He and his wife came to have a net worth of more than $ 700 million. He then filed for bankruptcy, went on to serve a life sentence and passed away last April while in prison.
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He was tried by the Department of Justice for 11 counts of fraud, money laundering, perjury and theft. His gigantic Ponzi Scheme began to unravel after investors requested around more than $ 6 billion in returns. Madoff duped the list of investors with the whopping figure of more than $ 60 billion, according to CNN Business.
Madoff gave up most of his assets in a settlement with prosecutors. In exchange for her giving up most of her wealth, an estimated $ 70 billion worth of “mansions, jewelry, cars, and art.”His wife, Ruth Madoff, received about $ 2.2 million. Since then he has lived in Old Greenwich, Connecticut.
Elizabeth Holmes
His assets were estimated at about $ 5,000 million, thanks to your blood test company Theranos. Holmes was considered a star in Silicon Valley.
By the end of 2004 his company had achieved slightly more than 5 million private investors, some of whom had strong personal connections to Holmes.
In 2012, after Holmes tried to get Lt. Col. David Shoemaker to sign an army test, he raised his concerns with the Food and Drug Administration. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) conducted an inspection of the company. They were told that “the device was still in development.”
By November 2015, Theranos had lost its two main partnerships with Safeway and Walgreens. In 2016, CMS concluded that testing Theranos could pose a safety risk to patients.
Theranos closed its doors in 2018 and Holmes was charged with “massive fraud.” She and her partner Sunny Balwani have been charged with wire fraud by the Justice Department. Forbes lists Holmes’s personal net worth at zero.
Björgólfur Gudmundsson
He accumulated his great fortune by being related to the beer industry, in addition, He owned the UK football team West Ham.
He was considered the second richest man in Iceland, but in 2009 he declared bankruptcy. His insurance covered a debt of almost $ 700 million. At that moment, it was the largest bankruptcy in Icelandic history.
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One of the main causes of Gudmundsson’s fall from grace it was the result of the downfall of the Icelandic economy during the recession. Gudmundsson and his son, Björgólfur “Thor” Gudmundsson, were both major shareholders in Icelandic bank Landsbanki, which collapsed in October 2008.
Although the patrimony of patient and son came to be at 0, the latter has since recovered a large part of its wealth, in what Forbes called a “crazy comeback.”
Eike Batista
He was the owner of an oil company (OGX), which went bankrupt in 2013. He was very popular for his luxurious lifestyle and was taken as an inspiration to the younger generations in Brazil.
In 2012, Batista’s fortune was approximately $ 27,000 million, which made him the seventh richest man in the world.
A year later he had to declare bankruptcy because Batista’s oil company it did not meet the demands and the Brazilian economy collapsed.
Batista was charged with money laundering and corruption in January 2017. In July 2018, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for bribing former Rio de Janeiro governor Sergio Cabral.
Allen Stanford
It is the leader of the second largest investor fraud case in US history. His popularity increased due to his shady deals and scamming more than 18,000 clients. Unlike Madoff’s victims, many of Stanford’s victims have yet to receive compensation for the crimes committed against them.
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Stanford’s crimes began after a Texas fitness club he owned went bankrupt; Then he turned to banking offshore and began operating his scheme. According to CNBC, many of the Stanford victims they were retirees who were promised “safe investments.”
Stanford was convicted of 13 felonies in 2012 and serving a 110-year sentence in a high-security prison in Florida, reported CNBC.
Donald Trump
Although he has not filed for bankruptcy, several of his companies have been declared bankrupt.
For example, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City filed for bankruptcy in 1991 after “Defaulting on interest payments to bondholders when their finances plummeted,” wrote Robert O’Harrow of the Washington Post. Two other Trump casinos have also filed for bankruptcy, along with the Plaza Hotel in New York. (I)
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