poor little rich girl
Roger Boyes in Berlin:The gigolo lover of Germany's wealthiest woman - the owner of a large chunk of BMW - goes on trial today, charged with trying to blackmail her out of millions of euros of her family fortune.
To the embarrassment of the staid and reclusive Quandt dynasty, the heiress Susanne Klatten, 46, may be called to give evidence against the man who seduced her, Helg Sgarbi. The Swiss businessman is on trial on charges of fraud and extortion and faces a ten-year jail term. The indictment gives a clue as to what lies ahead: tangled stories about Mafia vengeance, disclosures about the techniques used by fortune hunters, perhaps even references to the links between the Quandt family and the
Nazi leadership.The key words in the trial will be Seven Up. It is a reference not to a fizzy drink but to a code - mentioned, it is claimed, in a phone conversation between Mr Sgarbi, 43, and Ms Klatten - for the €7 million (£6.2 million) she was told to deliver in a cardboard box to the underground garage of a Munich hotel where they used to make love.
The next demand was allegedly even more ambitious: Seven times Seven Up, or €49 million. If Ms Klatten failed to deliver, it is alleged, Mr Sgarbi would send details of their affair to her husband, to her mother and to the executive board of BMW. Instead, Ms Klatten went to the police.
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Until now Mr Sgarbi has remained silent, held in a Munich cell under pre-trial arrest for almost a year. His only public statement seemed to hint at his old gentlemanly self, the thoughtfulness that had made him so attractive not only to Ms Klatten but also to three other wealthy women. The extortion charges also apply to these three.
“I remain silent, out of respect to the ladies concerned - which is more than can be said for those who are pumping information into the public domain,” he said in a brief statement.
Leaks of the prosecutor's indictment, including large extracts of Ms Klatten's testimony to the police, have filled the German press for months. As a result, even before the trial has started - even before it is clear whether Mr Sgarbi will confess or will contest the charges - a national debate has broken out: why are wealthy women so often vulnerable to cheats? How could a woman as powerful as Ms Klatten - who has a demanding job, a passion for philanthropy, a loving husband and three children - fall for a chancer?
Mr Sgarbi's reluctance to enter the public fray has almost certainly been dictated by his lawyers, who will try to show that the trial has been prejudiced by the leaking of documents to the press. As long as the businessman-turned-gigolo holds his tongue he has some bargaining power; if he makes a full confession there will be no need to summon Ms Klatten into the witness stand. That would probably translate into a much milder sentence.
The choice of defence lawyer for Mr Sgarbi was significant: Egon Geiss, 77, a legal veteran who made his name defending Nazis and whose speciality is invoking paragraph 220 of the Criminal Code, which allows him to overrule a judge's wishes and call witnesses to give evidence. In theory he could call both Ms Klatten and her husband. Insiders say, too, he could stir up stories from the Nazi past: Susanne Klatten is, after all, from the Quandt family; her grandfather was Günther Quandt, who advised Hitler on economic affairs and who made batteries for Nazi U-boats.
Mr Sgarbi, whose original name was Russak, may, according to Italian reports, be descended from forced labourers and have been out for revenge.
He first met Ms Klatten in the summer of 2007 at the exclusive Lanserhof spa in the Austrian Tyrol. The indictment states that he had thoroughly researched Ms Klatten before approaching her - and that he was simultaneously playing along two wives of industrialists staying at the mountain resort. “He was charming, attentive,” said Ms Klatten in her later testimony to the Munich police, “and at the same time he seemed very sad. That stirred a feeling in me that we had something in common.” They went on long walks together and when Ms Klatten returned to her responsibilities at BMW and the chemical giant Altana they stayed in touch.
By August of that year, according to Ms Klatten's version, the two were making love in a Munich hotel - but, unknown to her, they were being filmed from an adjoining room.
Mr Sgarbi allegedly told Ms Klatten that he was being threatened with death by a US Mafia don after accidentally running over the man's daughter in Florida. He told the same story, with some variations, to two of his other targets. The Mafia chief, he said, wanted €10 million for the care of his crippled daughter. Mr Sgarbi, who was posing as a rich business consultant, said that he could raise €3 million - but needed his lover to come up with the rest; hence the code, Seven Up.
When Ms Klatten tried to end the relationship - after admitting all to her husband - Mr Sgarbi allegedly pushed for more: seven times Seven Up. Compromising pictures arrived in the post - at which point she hired a private detective and informed the police, who sprang a trap at a ransom handover in Austria.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5870607.ece
A soon to be mashed up Swiss chocolateBERLIN - 'I LIVE off money that women give me,' the so-called 'Swiss gigolo' told his country's police in 2001.But when he allegedly tried to hoodwink BMW heiress Susanne Klatten, it looks like Helg Sgarbi got too greedy.On Monday Sgarbi goes on trial in Munich charged with blackmailing a string of super-rich women out of millions of euros. If convicted, the smooth-talking Sgarbi, who told his wealthy conquests he was a 'special Swiss representative in crisis zones', according to the charge sheet, faces up to 10 years in prison.According to prosecutors he first met Ms Klatten, who has a personal fortune of over US$13 billion (S$20 billion) according to the Forbes Rich List, at the Lanserhof exclusive Austrian health resort in July 2007.At first the married mother-of-three spurned his advances but when Sgarbi turned up unexpectedly in the south of France where she was on holiday the following month, they began an affair. Later in August they met in a Holiday Inn hotel in Munich - suitably downmarket for Ms Klatten not to run into any acquaintances - for an 'intimate' encounter that Sgarbi secretly filmed, according to the charge sheet.In September they met at the same hotel and this time Sgarbi allegedly said that he needed 10 million euros because he had injured a little girl in a car crash in Florida - asking Ms Klatten to lend him a cool seven million euros.Ms Klatten believed him, handing over the sum in the underground garage of the Holiday Inn a cardboard box containing seven plastic folders each containing a thousand 500-euro banknotes.But then Sgarbi went for the big one, telling the 46-year-old to leave her husband and put into a trust fund 290 million euros to fund their new life together.Ms Klatten balked, and ended the relationship. But then Sgarbi turned nasty, according to prosecutors, threatening to send compromising video footage of the two together to the press and to her husband, among others.This time he allegedly demanded 49 million euros, which he subsequently reduced to 14 million euros, and set a deadline of Jan 15 last year. But she had long since informed the police, and Sgarbi was arrested. -- AFP
A BMW crashed into Swissmade CUCKOOED Chocolate.....
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