The German press are calling it the trial of the year. I say of the decade. It reads like the synopsis of a (clichéd) novel. The gigolo lover of lonely billionaire and Germany’s richest lady, Susanne Klatten, goes into the dock today accused of extortion.
Helg Sgarbi, shown on the left – yes, I’d been expecting a bit more of a stud too – originally fleeced the wealthy German for €7.5m after claiming he’d accidentally killed a child in a car accident in the USA, and needed money to pay off its Mafiosi parents. He later went back for more – they always do, they always do. His demand of €49m was blackmail for the sex tapes he and his accomplice, Ernano Barretta, had made of his secret liaisons with Klatten. She bartered him down to €14m for the films, which he threatened to send to her husband and BMW staff, but instead of paying she contacted the polizei.
Leaks from a police interview with Barretta, suggest that the motive for the crime may have deeper roots than first thought. Helg Sgarbi’s father was “allegedly” one of the thousands of Polish Jews who worked as slave labourers for the BMW company during the Second World War.
Günther Quandt, the BMW founder, Susanne Klatten’s great-grandfather, Hitler’s armaments economic advisor, and whose first wife, Magda, later married Joseph Goebbels – you just couldn’t make this stuff up – made full use of concentration camp labour in at least three of his factories. Despite this, the Quandt family refused to contribute to the German Forced Labour Compensation Programme, citing that they had no reason to do so.
It may well transpire that an element of revenge for BMW’s wartime crimes is at play here, but it doesn’t account for the other rich chicks that Sgarbi and Barretta conned. The real question, though, is when will the tapes be available on youtube…
