A Billionaire Dreams of Steering Europe’s Future
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/business/global/nicolas-berggruens-big-dreams-of-steering-europes-future.html
Having amassed an estimated $2.5 billion fortune over the last two decades by buying up troubled companies and turning them around, Mr. Berggruen, 51, has been preoccupied of late in addressing what he sees as the woeful state of Western democratic institutions.
To that end, he spent more than $100 million in 2009 to establish the Berggruen Institute on Governance, packed with a global A-list of the rich and powerful. Its mission is to urge new — and, he says, better — forms of global governance.
His coterie includes Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor ; Jacques Delors, the former president of the European Commission ; and Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain.
Claus Leggewie, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, Germany, wonders why wealthy financiers and power brokers should be entrusted to devise solutions to a crisis that he argues is largely of their own making.
