Personal tragedy led entrepreneur Mark Weingard to found the Iniala resort
A Thai resort with individually designed rooms is a new charitable venture by entrepreneur and survivor Mark Weingard, says Giovanna Dunmall
"I grew up believing I would die at 35," says British entrepreneur Mark Weingard, whose father was killed in a car crash nine days before his 36th birthday. This keen sense of mortality drove Weingard to work hard, and by the time he was 29 he was the top trader at a bank in the City of London. By his early 30s he had amassed what he calls "a small fortune".
Since then, death has reared its head many more times. Weingard narrowly missed a meeting in the World Trade Centre on the morning of September 11, 2001 because he was running late.
I decided there and then I was going to change the way I lived
Then, on Boxing Day in 2004, he awoke to gargantuan waves racing towards his beach house in Phuket. He and 17 others survived the Indian Ocean tsunami by climbing on to the roof of his house, which was luckily built on stilts. The ocean carried away all its contents.
Weingard did reach the fateful age of 36, but tragically, three months after his birthday celebrations, his fiancée Annika Linden was one of the victims of the 2002 Bali terrorist bombings.
"I decided there and then I was going to change the way I lived," he says, his blue eyes shining. He set up the Annika Linden Foundation, since renamed the Inspirasia foundation.
Over the past 10 years (along with other companies he has invested in) it has donated more than US$10 million to 13 education, health and rehabilitation projects in Thailand, Indonesia and India. Earlier this year, Weingard opened the Annika Linden Centre in Bali. This houses a prosthetics workshop, a stroke victims' clinic and a kindergarten for children with cerebral palsy.