Lily Safra

Lily Safra (née Watkins; also Cohen, Monteverde and Bendahan; 30 December 1934 – 9 July 2022) was a Brazilian-Monegasque billionaire and socialite who amassed considerable wealth through her four marriages.

She had a significant art collection and owned the historic Villa Leopolda on the French Riviera.

Her net worth was estimated at $1.3 billion.

Lily Safra was born Lily Watkins on 30 December 1934 in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

She was the daughter of Wolf White Watkins, a railway engineer of Anglo-Jewish origin who was born in Czechoslovakia and moved to South America during the electrification of Brazilian railroads, and Annita Noudelman de Castro, a Uruguayan of Russian Jewish ancestry.

She grew up in Rio de Janeiro, and then moved with her family to Montevideo, Uruguay.

At age 17, she met and married Mario Cohen, an Argentine hosiery magnate of Italian Jewish descent.

They had three children.

He was a Romanian Jewish immigrant who fled Europe in 1939.

He was a leader in the Brazilian household appliance distribution business, where he established the Ponto Frio brand.

Lily adopted his child, named Carlos.

Lily and Mario Cohen divorced in the early 1960s.

In 1965, Lily married Alfredo Monteverde, formerly Greenberg.

In 1969, Monteverde killed himself.

A month after his death, Lily moved to London.

Her late husband's banker, Edmond Safra, helped her secure control over her late spouse's entire fortune.

She dated Safra for some time, but the romance ended.

At the time, Safra's family, who is of Sephardic Jewish descent, did not approve of his relationship with Lily, who was of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.

In 1972, she married businessman Samuel Bendahan, also a Sephardic Jew, and a man of more modest means.

They separated after two weeks, and she divorced him one year later.

In 1976, she married Safra.

The prominent banker was of Syrian Jewish origin and a naturalized Brazilian citizen.

He founded the Republic National Bank of New York.

The couple divided their time among homes in New York City, Monaco, Geneva, and the Villa Leopolda on the French Riviera.

In 1977, she, her husband Edmond Safra, and Nina Weiner founded the International Sephardic Education Foundation.

She chaired the Edmond J. Safra Foundation, which supports medical research and humanitarian relief.

The Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics has been established at Harvard.

She became strongly engaged with philanthropy when she married the banker Edmond Safra, and this continued through their foundation after his death in 1999.

On 2 December 1999, Lily and Edmond Safra gained Monegasque citizenship.

On 3 December 1999, Edmond was killed in Monaco in a fire that was determined to be arson.

His death attracted considerable media interest because of his wealth and position.

Edmond Safra "apparently felt so safe here that he did not have his bodyguards stay the night when he slept in Monaco".

Ted Maher, a former U.S. Green Beret, was accused of starting the fire in order to gain acceptance from Edmond Safra when he would ultimately rescue him, but it went out of control.

Maher was convicted and sentenced to ten years in jail.

Edmond Safra left 50% of his assets to several charities, with the remainder divided among his family members and wife Lily, who received $800 million.

Lady Colin Campbell's novel Empress Bianca (2005) was considered to be a defamatory roman à clef by Safra's solicitor, Anthony Julius.

Reacting to the legal threat in the United Kingdom, its publishers, Arcadia, withdrew the book and destroyed unsold copies.

A revised edition of the book was later published in the United States.

Lily Safra died from pancreatic cancer in Geneva on 9 July 2022 at age 87.

Lily Safra supported numerous foundations, organisations, and charities.