Three of the four children of Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen were among the casualties of the Sri Lanka terror blasts on Easter Sunday. Povlsen is a clothing business magnate who owns the international clothing chain Bestseller. The chain includes brands like Vero Moda and Jack & Jones.
46-year-old Povlsen and his wife Anne Storm Pedersen had four children, Alma, Astrid, Agnes and Alfred. The Danish media said that the family was on holiday in Sri Lanka when the blasts happened. A couple of days before the attack, one of the four Povlsen children, Alma, had shared a holiday photograph of the siblings from Sri Lanka on Instagram.
The location of the blast and the names of the children who were killed have been withheld from the media. Jesper Stubkier, a spokesperson for Bestseller, told the media, “I can confirm that three children have been killed. We have no further comment and we ask that the family’s privacy is respected at this time.”
Povlsen inherited Bestseller, which is estimated to be worth about £4.5bn, from his father at the age of 28. The Danish retail chain is said to have thousands of branded chain stores, mutlibrand and in-departments stores across Europe, North America, Latin America, Australia, the Middle East and India. He is also the biggest shareholder in the British retail clothing chain Asos, and the second biggest shareholder in the German clothing company Zalando. According to Forbes, Povlsen’s net worth is estimated to be around £6.1bn.
The Povlsens are also believed to the the largest private landowners in Scotland and the second largest in the UK, after acquiring several Scottish historic estates estimated to be more than 220,000 acres. Povlsen had bought the land as part of landscape scale conservation project. The Povlsen couple have been working on conservation of landscapes in the region. They had written on their website Wildland in the past that they would pass on their vision to their children, who would carry it on after they were gone. “It is a project that we know cannot be realised in our lifetime, which will bear fruit not just for our own children but also for the generations of visitors who, like us, hold a deep affection for the Scottish Highlands,” the couple had said.