All through Roger Thiberville’s lengthy life, he by no means as soon as visited the Normandy city that gave him his final identify. Descended from a household of winery house owners, he inherited property in Paris from his mother and father and labored as a meteorologist.
However when he died in August on the age of 91 leaving no descendants, the mayor of Thiberville (inhabitants 1,773) obtained a telephone name. Thiberville the person had left Thiberville the city most of his estimated €10m fortune.
Man Paris, the mayor of Thiberville, stated astonished and delighted locals and officers had been now contemplating find out how to spend the sudden windfall, which is 5 instances the municipality’s annual finances. “It’s an distinctive sum of cash. Clearly the quantity is past creativeness,” Paris advised the native radio station, France Bleu. “We don’t but know what we are going to do with it.
“We’re not going to spend all of it. We’re going to handle this dowry as we’ve all the time accomplished with our municipal finances – with prudence and duty.”
The French commune is now seeking to repay a financial institution mortgage of greater than €400,000 used to construct a brand new major college. As a result of the city is a public physique it is not going to should pay any inheritance tax.
Paris stated it appeared Thiberville’s solely hyperlink with the city was his identify and that he understood the city’s benefactor had lived “humbly in Paris”, the place he owned 4 flats within the metropolis’s south-eastern fifteenth arrondissement. Maybe surprisingly, there are not any identified images of him. Thiberville’s solely acknowledged want was for his ashes to be positioned in a memorial within the commune’s cemetery.
“Monsieur Thiberville didn’t demand something in return for his legacy, however we owe him a minimum of that,” the mayor stated.
Thiberville is an unremarkable city boasting a late-Nineteenth-century château and a former ribbon manufacturing facility, however little else to mark it out from different Norman communes.
The closest main attraction is the grand Basilica at Lisieux – 16km to the west – constructed in honour of Saint Thérèse and opened within the Fifties.
Paris stated: “We now have initiatives: a public backyard with a play space, a boules floor with photo voltaic panels that may function shade, the renovation of the elementary college, an artificial soccer pitch…”
Whereas Thiberville celebrated its success, the neighbouring villages of Le Planquay and La Chapelle-Hareng could also be regretting a choice to not merge with the city with a purpose to obtain subsidies reserved for communes with greater than 2,000 inhabitants. The plan was rejected by neighbouring councillors, that means Thiberville is not going to be sharing its inheritance.
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