Lily Safra

Lily Safra is a philanthropist and social figure. Born to an affluent family, she attained considerable wealth after several marriages. Her net worth is estimated at $1 billion, ranking her as the 620th richest person in the world according Forbes in 2005.

Biography

Lily Safra was born in 1938 in Porto Alegre, Brazil to an English father. At the age of 17, she married first Mario Cohen, an Argentine hosiery magnate. They divorced in the early 1960s. In 1965, she married second Freddy Monteverde, a leader in the Brazilian appliance distribution business, who committed suicide in 1969."The Mail on Sunday - Reissued in America: the murder plot novel that was pulped over feud with Gilded Lily", 21 September 2008] She married third (name unknown)."The Mail on Sunday", 21 September 2008] She lost her son in a car crash."The Mail on Sunday", 21 September 2008]

In 1976, she married, fourth, Edmond Safra, a Brazilian-naturalized Jewish Lebanese banker. Their international lifestyle included homes in New York, London, Geneva and the French Riviera.

The couple never had any children.

Edmond Safra's Death

In 1999, Edmond Safra, a sufferer of Parkinson's disease, perished when he locked himself in an airtight safe to escape from a criminal fire at their apartment in Monaco. Lily Safra survived, as she was saved from the fire by the police. An American nurse, Ted Maher, was arrested under suspicion of starting the fire, and was convicted of the crime in 2002. He claimed that he had started the fire to carry out a daring rescue, in order to increase his standing in the Safra family's eyes, but that he lost control of the fire. The facts and assertions about the events have been scrutinized by several media "mystery solvers" including "60 Minutes" and by Dominick Dunne in "Vanity Fair".

Threatened libel suit against Lady Colin Campbell

Lily Safra engaged Anthony Julius to stop the publication by Lady Colin of a fictional novel, "Empress Bianca", about a rich double murderess, Bianca Barrett, who orders a hitman to kill her second husband and make it look like a suicide and whose fourth husband was killed in a fire started by a nurse who is manipulated by Bianca. To Lady Colin's astonishment, Lily Safra identified with that fictional character."The Mail on Sunday", 21 September 2008]

Philanthropy

Safra is the Chairwoman of the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation, which supports projects related to education, science and medicine, religion, culture, and humanitarian relief. She serves on the Boards of the The Michael J. Fox Foundation For Parkinson's Research, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, and she is a member of the Chairman's Council of the Museum of Modern Art. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard and is Honorary Chairman of the ISEF Foundation, which provides university scholarships for gifted Israeli students from disadvantaged backgrounds. She also supports the Lily Safra Internship Program at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. The internship program takes place during the summer and allows six undergraduate and two graduate students to carry out research at the HBI.

Honors

Lily Safra holds honorary doctorates from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Brandeis University, and she is an Honorary Fellow of King's College London. The French Government accorded her the rank of Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004, and she was named Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur by President Jacques Chirac in 2005.

References

External links

* [http://www.michaeljfox.org/about_people_board_bio.cfm?ID=90 Michael J. Fox Foundation For Parkinson's Research]
* [http://www.fnih.org/aboutus/safrabio.shtml www.fnih.org]