Tiny French town left €10m fortune by a man who had never been there
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Thiberville in Normandy receives windfall worth five times annual budget from a Paris resident who was named after it. Throughout Roger Thiberville’s long life, he never once visited the Normandy town that gave him his last name. Descended from a family of vineyard owners, he inherited property in Paris from his parents and worked as a meteorologist.
But when he died in August at the age of 91 leaving no descendants, the mayor of Thiberville (population 1,773) received a phone call. Thiberville the man had left Thiberville the town most of his estimated €10m fortune. Guy Paris, the mayor of Thiberville, said astonished and delighted locals and officials were now considering how to spend the unexpected windfall, which is five times the municipality’s annual budget. “It’s an exceptional sum of money. Obviously the amount is beyond imagination,” Paris told the local radio station, France Bleu. “We don’t yet know what we will do with it.
“We’re not going to spend it all. We’re going to manage this dowry as we’ve always done with our municipal budget – with prudence and responsibility.”. The French commune is now looking to pay off a bank loan of more than €400,000 used to build a new primary school. Because the town is a public body it will not have to pay any inheritance tax.
Paris said it appeared Thiberville’s only link with the town was his name and that he understood the town’s benefactor had lived “humbly in Paris”, where he owned four apartments in the city’s south-eastern 15th arrondissement. Perhaps surprisingly, there are no known photographs of him. Thiberville’s only stated wish was for his ashes to be placed in a memorial in the commune’s cemetery.
