Melinda French Gates started working with divorce lawyers properly more than a year ahead of her split with Bill Gates was announced last week, partly more than issues about her husband’s dealings with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The 56-year-old spoke with attorneys from quite a few firms as early as October 2019, saying the marriage was “irretrievably broken,” the Journal reported Sunday, citing documents and folks familiar with the matter. Her unease about her ex-husband’s ties to Epstein dates back to at least 2013, the paper stated.
The New York Times reported in October 2019 that the billionaire had met with Epstein quite a few occasions, and after stayed late at his New York townhouse. A spokeswoman for Microsoft Corp. co-founder stated at the time that the meetings had centered on philanthropy. Epstein had died in jail two months prior when awaiting trial on federal charges connected to sex trafficking.
The divorce was negotiated in the course of the pandemic, involving legal teams working with a mediator to divide their fortune, which the Bloomberg Billionaires Index pegs at $145 billion.
The couple stated that they program on remaining co-chairs and trustees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Billionaire Warren Buffett serves as the foundation’s third trustee. All 3 have vowed to give away the vast majority of their wealth.
In the days soon after the split was announced, a holding business that Bill Gates developed transferred equity stakes in 4 distinct businesses, worth more than $2 billion in aggregate, to Melinda French Gates, Bloomberg News has reported. The bulk of it is from about 14.1 million shares in Canadian National Railway Co.
Days ahead of he died in a New York jail, Epstein named a small-recognized biotech venture capitalist named Boris Nikolic as backup executor of his will. Nikolic had worked as a science adviser to Bill Gates and more not too long ago funded more than a dozen firms in gene editing and other overall health technologies.
In an emailed statement at the time, Nikolic told Bloomberg that Epstein had not consulted him about the will and that he had no intention to fulfill the duties.
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