Xisiqomelir
Member
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article5225802.ece
Susanne Klatten: the billionairess and her dangerous liaison
A gigolo is accused of seducing, then trying to swindle Germany's richest woman out of millions of euros. The tale involves a Mafia link, Nazi slave labour, a secret sex film and an Italian sect
Helg Sgarbi used to boast to colleagues that he could read women like a map: everything was signposted, each turn in the road. So the 41-year-old Swiss gigolo would have considered it a breakthrough when an apparently reclusive billionairess started to pose personal questions in the special, offhand way that women use when they are trying to conceal a burning interest in the answers.
That is roughly how it went, according to Susanne Klatten's testimony to the Munich police. It did not take long for Sgarbi to ensnare her. The heiress to a big chunk of the Quandt empire - which has gone from producing uniforms for the Kaiser's soldiers to making batteries for Hitler's U-boats to calling the shots in BMW - is 46 now, the wealthiest woman in Germany. Yet a lifetime of being shielded from bounty-hunters made her vulnerable to the more subtle, serpentine approaches of Sgarbi.
The result: an extraordinary blackmail case that has stunned Germany, Italy and Switzerland, with more and more details seeping from lawyers' offices and even an interview with Klatten, perhaps the nation's most publicity-shy woman. The story involves clandestine sex pictures and an obscure Italian sect, and has a thread leading back to the Nazi years.
Susanne Klatten seemed, on the face of it, to have it all. A fortune estimated at between 9 billion and 10 billion (£7.6billion to £8.5 billion). Seats on the board of two top German companies - BMW and the chemicals giant Altana. A love of philanthropy and the financial means to change lives for the better. A handsome, admiring husband and three well-adjusted children.
In an interview with a German paper last weekend, Klatten said that despite a privileged upbringing, she owed this normalcy of her family life to her parents. While instilling in her a sense of duty to be benevolent, her father had also warned her about the potential pitfalls of wealth. She learnt to question the honesty of the people she encountered. Is the person who is sitting in front of me authentic? she would ask herself. Yet, by her own admission, she often made the mistake of opening herself up to the wrong people. In this case, she says, you become the victim.
Sgarbi, now in a Munich jail, awaiting trial on extortion charges, is handsome in a take-him-home-to-meet-your-mother kind of way. Tall, slim, square-jawed, newly enamelled teeth, a slow blink. But not exactly Heathcliff. There is nothing wild, tousled or tortured about him. The son of a Swiss executive, he is a law graduate and a bank manager - and that is precisely how he looks. All the pictures of him radiate a freshly bathed, talcumpowdered decency. One feels sure that he uses moisturising cream on his hands.
Klatten's police statement details how the two met in the summer of 2007, in the Austrian Tyrol. On July 9 Klatten checked into the Lanserhof spa near Innsbruck, which is used by top managers and the occasional oligarch - Roman Abramovich pops in sometimes - to reduce their stress levels. As a guest you spend half the day drinking herbal teas and juices in a dressing gown, waiting for your massage appointment and staring out of the windows at the Alps. In the evening you attend a lecture about how to balance body and spirit, and by 9pm you are in your bed. You sleep a lot in Lanserhof.
The day-to-day management of Klatten's fortunes - the 12.5 per cent stake in BMW, the controlling stake in Altana - is handled by her husband Jan. They had met when she was in her mid-twenties and was doing a brief traineeship at BMW after taking a degree at the University of Buckingham and a Swiss management school. He was an engineer, she was using the pseudonym Susanne Kant and Jan apparently romanced her for months before she revealed her true identity. But while her husband does much of the spadework, Klatten has been developing a hands-on approach to her companies. She was personally involved, for example, in moves to oust Bernd Pischetsrieder from the helm of BMW. A 9 billion fortune demands decisions, action, signatures - a workload, combined with motherhood, enough to induce a mild case of burn-out - and reason enough to visit Lanserhof, where only the Russians refuse to switch off their phones.
Sgarbi checked in three days later. It is not clear whether he had targeted Klatten or was simply trawling. For a few days he ignored her, then they exchanged polite smiles over breakfast. Perhaps this is part of the gigolo's craft: the restraint, the respectful distance.
The hook-up came on July 19, four days before Klatten was due to check out and return to her Munich villa.
She was reading The Alchemist by the Brazilian Paulo Coelho, a spiritual fable about following one's dreams. My favourite book, said Sgarbi, and sat next to her.
Slowly he told his tale, some of it true. He had grown up in Brazil; his father had been the head of Sulzer, the Swiss engineering group, in South America, so he spoke Portuguese. And Spanish. And Italian - he neglected to mention that he was married to an Italian woman and was even using her name. And French, English and German. He was an officer in the Swiss army reserve. Then came the fantasy: the Swiss Government, he said, sometimes called on him to sort out crises abroad discreetly and efficiently - hostage-taking, that kind of thing. It was an honorary job, he said. This appealed to Klatten, who spends a great deal of time deciding how much Quandt money should go to which charitable cause. With annual dividends of more than 100 million, there is enough in the petty cash box to help struggling young entrepreneurs, or immigration projects. She approved of Sgarbi's readiness to give up his time. Then there was his military sense of duty, his openness to adventure, his thoughtfulness, the delicacy of his questioning, their shared admiration for Coelho - and, underneath it all, that sense of melancholy. He was charming, attentive, she said in her 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.
Was that enough? For a while it was. Klatten, who had been taught from early childhood never to talk to strangers, ended up falling in love with one.
Men like this release the maternal instinct in women. They want to take care of him, worry about him, says Christine Baumanns, a psychologist who specialises in partner therapy. That is the beginning. Suddenly they land in a relationship that is beneath them, socially speaking. Then comes the element of the forbidden, the secret. That releases the happiness hormone and creates an addictive state.
For the last few days of the holiday, Klatten says that she and Sgarbi walked in the mountains together, drank tea and talked. They exchanged mobile phone numbers and, hours after arriving back in Munich, Klatten was text-messaging her new friend.
Their next meeting was in August, four weeks later, at the Holiday Inn in the Schwabing district of Munich - a far cry from the Lanserhof. It is a conference hotel, and Room 629, where they met, is designated a comfort room - meaning that it has tea-making equipment, a king-size mattress and a view of the kitchen wholesale shop across the road. The lift from the underground garage goes straight to the corridor; 629 is three steps away, so Klatten did not have to cross the reception area. There was no chance of being recognised.
The threshold to Room 629 was an important frontier. Until then they had been kindred spirits; inside the room they were lovers.
Next door, in Room 630, somebody filmed them making love. Italian police have detained and accused a 63-year-old Italian named Ernano Barretta of being the accomplice - perhaps even the mastermind. Barretta, who has been described as the head of a sect, denies everything. One thing is sure: the room was chosen specifically to set up Klatten. Just across the corridor is a fire escape for a quick getaway.
By August 26 the affair was accelerating and they were back in Room 629. Klatten says that Sgarbi had an explanation for his inner sadness - the ache of guilt, he said, that kept him awake at night. On his last trip to Miami he had been involved in a car accident. It was not his fault, but he had nonetheless hit and killed the young daughter of a Mafia capo. Now the Mafia had started a vendetta against him, threatening to shred him unless he paid blood money. They wanted 10 million; he could raise 3 million easily enough, but where was the rest to come from? Swiss, Italian and German police, digging into Sgarbi's gigolo career, claimed that he had used this Mafia princess fairytale on at least three previous occasions.
In the winter of 2000, for example, Sgarbi had wooed the wealthy octogenarian Comtesse Verena du Pasquier in Monte Carlo, invited her to dinner, sent flowers to her hotel room. The Comtesse, enchanted, dyed her hair red for her jeune homme. She was moved by Sgarbi's hard-luck story. The Mafia! How terrible! Money was transferred. Then friends of the Comtesse carried out some research on Sgarbi and informed the old lady of their suspicions. A complaint was lodged and Sgarbi was detained by the Swiss police. Some of the money was paid back, the Comtesse forgave her romantic young man, the case was dropped - and Sgarbi moved on to new hunting grounds.
Klatten knew nothing of this. Sgarbi was her secret and there was no question of engaging private detectives to screen him.
Everything about the affair represented an astonishing break from her upbringing. Her half-blind father Herbert Quandt, one of the most talented industrialists of his generation, had taught her and her younger brother Stefan to be discreet about wealth. There were two models of behaviour in the Quandt family: flash and prudent. The flashy wing was represented by Harald, half-brother to Herbert. Harald had a messed-up childhood. He was the son of Guenther and Magda Quandt. When Magda left the marriage to live with and wed the Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, she took Harald with her; the little blond Hitler Youth cadet was present on their wedding day. Fortunately for Harald, he was absent when Magda poisoned her six other children in Hitler's bunker.
After the war Harald embarked on the life of a committed playboy: a mistress in West Berlin, expensive prostitutes, drunken nights with boxers watching women wrestle in mud on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. He died in an air crash in 1967.
That was not to be Susanne Klatten's path. Herbert had turned BMW from a basket case to a highly profitable concern. His strand of the Quandt empire was run with discipline, and the same was expected from his children: Susanne was not extended the indulgence of frenzied party-going or adisorderly love life. We went to a normal school and lived as normal a life as one can in that kind of family, says Klatten. Even so, as a rich industrialist living in Seventies Germany, Herbert was terrified that his daughter would be kidnapped.
It was not an unreasonable fear. In 1978 police had uncovered a plot to snatch Susanne, then 16, and her mother Johanna and hold them to ransom. The plot was foiled, but the Baader-Meinhof gang was striking fear into the hearts of the business elite. Particularly shocking was the kidnap and murder in 1977 of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, head of the German Industry Confederation and, as the terrorists trumpeted from the rooftops, a former SS officer.
What would these people do if they got their hands on the Quandts? Not only was the family hugely wealthy, but part of its fortune had been built with the help of slave labourers provided by the SS. Little wonder, then, that Susanne Quandt, as she remained until her wedding at the age of 28, led a sheltered life. Even then, in a different age, she lived behind high walls. She went skiing, played golf and was seen at charity balls, but as far as the society press was concerned she was almost invisible.
But the armour was pierced in Lanserhof. With Sgarbi she was raw and vulnerable. That much she has admitted to the police.
Women in this situation are getting a glimpse of a life quite different from their normal lives as wives and mothers, says Dirk Revenstorf, professor of psychology at Tübingen University. Suddenly they find a complement to the part of their personality that they had always suppressed - a lightness that would not normally have fitted into their concept of family life. Perhaps something dirty, something shabby.
So, confronted with Sgarbi's cock-and-bull story, Klatten had a choice: to pretend to believe in a Mafia conspiracy and continue the adventure, or to make a clean break. She left Room 629 without promising anything. A few days later she decided to lend him the cash.
She had been plagued by guilt that, as she reportedly told the Munich police, I did not help a person who needed help. On September 11 last year, she drove to the Holiday Inn underground car park with 7.5 million in 200 notes. That, Sgarbi allegedly said, was how the Mafia wanted it. She parked in a section marked Parking for Ladies Only. On the wall there are signs announcing: For Your Own Safety, You are Kindly Requested Not to Leave Valuables of Any Kind in Your Car.
In the leaked police testimony, Klatten does not relate her feelings at the handover. The betting is that she had reached an emotional turning point; she had paid her imagined debt to her lover and wanted to put an end to the grubbiness of it all.
Apparently, disillusionment had set in by October: I realised that he wasn't the man he claimed to be. She was determined to end the affair. Her husband had registered her strange behaviour, her disappearances, the phone bills: it was time to ensure that Sgarbi did not threaten the family.
It was never going to be easy to shake off Sgarbi. When she stopped replying to his text messages, he sent her letters. They contained a hint of menace. Do you remember, my love, when we met in broad daylight in a Munich hotel room after your holidays? said one. The signature read Your gentle warrior. By November the tone was steelier: a hard-nosed demand for 49 million and a CD of stills from one of the candid-camera sessions in the Holiday Inn. Time, then, for Klatten to inform her husband and to consult a professional mediator.
There was a moment of clarity, Klatten says. You are a victim now and you have to resist. Otherwise it will never end.
Sgarbi was sensitive enough to realise that the relationship had curdled. Klatten was ready to give money if she could persuade herself that she was doing so willingly, to aid someone in distress. But her whole education had geared her to toughing out naked demands for cash. The Quandts had been irritated and embarrassed by a documentary film, The Silence of the Quandts, which castigated her family for paying insufficient compensation to former slave labourers. But despite the brouhaha and bad publicity, they did not pay up. If they were not ready to cough up for these Nazi victims, why should they enrich a gigolo with - detectives now unearthed - a track record of deceiving wealthy women?
The Quandt family was ready to repel all boarders. Klatten pretended that she was prepared to pay more - 14 million - and Sgarbi was lured into a police trap. He has been in detention for almost a year while the authorities unravel his past activities.
The trial is expected early next year. Some European newspapers have reported that he told interrogators that his actions were an act of revenge; he apparently claimed that his father, a Polish Jew, was a slave labourer during the war, who was forced to work in a Quandt-owned factory producing steel for the Nazi war effort. Italian newspapers, meanwhile, have speculated that he was one of 30 disciples of Barretta - a balding, unprepossessing man who reportedly once claimed to have walked on water - who were committed to handing over a slice of their earnings to their leader. Police found millions of euros stashed in the grounds of Barretta's house in the Abruzzo. Did Barretta push Sgarbi to demand more and more from Klatten?
Barretta denies any involvement. Sgarbi has not commented except to complain about press coverage of his gigolo past. It could, he says, prejudice the court. His defence will probably be that Klatten gave him the first sum out of love, not under duress.
But for once the man who prided himself on understanding women had misread the map, even held it upside down. Klatten - shy, tightly coiled - was not, as he had calculated, a submissive personality who could be intimidated. The sense of duty that her father taught her prevailed. I am struggling now in the name of every woman in my family, she says, and in the names of many other women ... I am glad to have done this.
At the risk of looking foolish, she went public with her affair. If Sgarbi had really read The Alchemist he would have known that the key sentence is: Don't give in to your fears ... if you do, you won't be able to talk to your heart.
Rise of the Quandts
The foundations of the Quandt family empire were laid by Susanne Klatten's grandfather, Günther, who turned over his father's Brandenburg cloth mill to make uniforms in the First World War.
After the Armistice, Quandt diversified, investing in more than 100 companies, and his factories were soon supplying the Third Reich with ammunition and artillery. His core company, Accumulatoren-Fabrik (AFA), produced batteries for submarines, tanks and even V-2 rockets. In 1937, Hitler awarded Günther the honorific title of Leader of the Armament Economy. By this time his ex-wife, Magda, was also involved with the Nazi party, having married Joseph Goebbels.
AFA employed slave workers from concentration camps in its factories, forcing them to toil in appalling conditions. The work could be lethal.
After the war, the Quandt empire was split between sons Harald and Herbert. The latter turned BMW into one of the world's most desirable car brands, and his third marriage, to his secretary Johanna, produced two heirs, Susanne and Stefan. When Herbert died in 1982, the three inherited dozens of firms with an annual turnover of 6.5 billion. Today, the Quandt family's fortune is estimated at 24 billion.
The family received harsh criticism in 2007, after a TV documentary on its wartime activity. Only then did it announce that it would fund a research project into its Nazi-era activities.
Claudia Fromme
