Billionaire Rausing Charged With 'Preventing Burial' After Living With Wife's Dead Body

Billionaire packaging heir Hans Kristian Rausing will appear in West London Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday charged with an unusual crime: “preventing the lawful and decent burial” of his late wife Eva.

The charge comes just over a week after socialite Eva Rausing’s body was discovered in the couple’s $110 million London home following an equally strange and sad chain of events.
Hans Kristian Rausing, 49-year-old Swedish heir to a $10 billion milk carton fortune, was spotted driving erratically in South London’s Wandsworth, a crime-ridden area a world away from the couple’s five-story mansion in pricey Cadogan Place.

A photo of Eva Rausing posted on her MySpace page.

After finding narcotics in his car, police searched the couple’s home and found 48-year-old Eva’s body. Rausing was arrested in connection with her death.

Since then, it has been widely speculated that Rausing lived alongside Eva’s corpse for days, if not weeks, during a drug and alcohol binge. This charge of “preventing burial” appears to confirm those suspicions, although the Metropolitan Police have yet to establish a cause or time of death due to the body’s decomposition.

The couple has a long and well-publicized history of drug abuse, and indeed first met at a rehab facility in the 1980s. They narrowly avoided prosecution on charges of crack cocaine and heroin possession in 2008, when they were caught trying to smuggle drugs into a party at the U.S. Embassy in London.

A larger stash of crack, heroin and cocaine was then found in a search of their Chelsea home. In an unusual arrangement, police decided not to prosecute after the couple agreed to drug counseling.

Eva Rausing had been back in rehab in the U.S. shortly before her death, returning only out of concern for Hans Kristian and hoping he’d join her in treatment. Her family has stood by Hans Kristian this past week, and shortly before he was charged on Tuesday night, Eva’s American father Thomas Kemeny released a statement in support of the troubled heir:

“Eva will be a devastating loss to our beloved ‘son’ Hans Kristian, whom we love unconditionally with all our hearts.”

Kemeny added that his daughter’s work with drug addiction charities “saved thousands of lives – tragically not her own.”

Hans Kristian is set to inherit part of a $10 billion fortune amassed by his 86-year-old father, Swedish born Hans Rausing, who inherited packaging giant Tetra Laval from his own father. Hans Sr. sold his share to brother Gad for an estimated $7 billion in 1995.

He moved the family, including Hans Kristian, to the U.K. in the early 1980s to avoid punitive Swedish taxes, and now resides on a 900-acre estate in village of Wadhurst in East Sussex.
Culled from forbes.com