NOW A DANE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 43, 19 January 1938, Page 12

NOW A DANE.

WOOLWORTH HEIRESS. NATIONALITY RENOUNCED. The recent renunciation of her American citizenship by Countess Barabara Hutton Haugwitz-Reventlow, the \V oolworth heiress, who has assumed the Danish nationality of her husband, is discussed in an article in the New York Times. The action was taken to resolve “various legal complications.”

The attorneys would not explain what the “various legal complications” were, says the article, but it was pointed out otherwise by tax experts that the countess has now put in a barrier to the collection of estate taxes by the United States, which would take about two-thirds of her 45,000,000 dollars estate when it passes to her two-year-old son, Lance Haug-witz-Reventlow, who was born in London and who has been declared a Dane by his father. The action by the countess gives particular interest to the figures published in 1936 during one of her recurrent disputes with the income tax collector. They showed that her fortune in 1933 was in excess of 45,000.000 dollars, and that 32,000,000 dollars of this was in Government securities of the country to which she has now “abjured all allegiance and fidelity-” FREE OF INCOME TAX. Whether she would sell these securities and take the proceeds to Denmark was a subject which her attorneys said they did not care to discuss. Since the interest paid by the Government bonds is exempt from income tax, however, there would seem no necessity to dispose of them,- in the opinion: of tax experts, if the change in the citizenship of the countess put them out of reach of estate tax.

Another question that could not be answered was why this dual nationality which the countess now found to be such “an unsatisfactory situation” had not caused any renunciation of citizenship during her earlier marriage to Prince Alexis Mdivani. The statute in either case was that “a woman citizen of the United States shall not cease to be a citizen of the United States by reason of her marriage unless she makes a forma) renunciation of her citizenship before a Court having jurisdiction over naturalisation of aliens.” DIVORCE AND REMARRIAGE.

Prince Alexis was a Georgian, like M. Stalin, but so unlike him otherwise that he had to travel on a League of Nations (or Nansen) passport as a man without a country. Since there was no renunciation of United States citizenship during this marriage, the former Miss Hutton was relieved of her first dual nationality by the divorce granted to her in Reno on May 13. 1935.

The day after the divorce, however, she acquired her next dual citizenship by marrying Count Kurt HaugwitzReventlow. Under the statutes of the United States the countess, is now as completely a Dane as if she had been horn in. Denmark. Divorce or the death of her husband will not change her status. She can become an American again only by doing what any other Danish immigrant must do. Otherwise, her present renunciation of United States citizenship is revocable only in one event—if the United States goes to war with any other nation within one year from the date on which she signed the papers. It was learned that the countess, taking advantage of her Danish nationality in Denmark, bad already provided herself with a Danish passport. It was on this that she made her last entry and departure from New York.

. According to the sworn vital statistics on the renunciation form, the countess was born in New York City on November 12, 1912. The count was born on September 23, 1895.