It’s awful, but the surname Rausing (once synonymous only with the Tetrapak fortune) now summons up a terrible stench in the imagination. It’s that of Eva Rausing’s decomposed body, wrapped in a tarpaulin on the marital double bed in Belgravia, buried under a mattress, several flat-screen televisions and a heap of blankets and duvets. When it was discovered by police forcing open the duct-taped bedroom door in July 2012 — more than two months after her husband Hans had left it there, unable to face up to his wife’s death from cocaine-induced heart failure — the only way Eva could be identified was by a fingerprint and the number on her pacemaker.
Rarely can ‘the problems of the very rich’ have been as shockingly highlighted as they were by that dreadful story. That a brilliant and gentle Swedish grandfather, who happened to come up with the idea of the Tetrapak carton, should unwittingly spawn such wealth, such misery, such tragedy.
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