A wealthy BMW heiress was one of three conned by Swiss gigolo.
Maybe Helg Sgarbi should’ve settled for a BMW 7-Series. Instead, the former Swiss banker decided to go for it all, blackmailing BMW heiress Susanne Klatten for millions of Euros in a convoluted scheme that involved rumors of revenge.
Posing as a special envoy for war zones, Sgarbi met Klatten in a health clinic and then began wooing her with phone calls and text messages professing his love. When she finally fell for his ploy, Sgarbi convinced the 46-year-old mother of three that he had accidentally paralyzed a child in an accident, in the U.S., and needed to come up with money to avoid going to jail.
The wealthiest woman in Germany – and the 68th richest person in the world – Klatten handed her lover a cardboard box full of 500 Euro notes, in all a total of 7 million Euros. But Sgarbi, at that time a lieutenant in the Swiss Army, wanted more. And after the heiress decided to break off their relationship, he threatened to release videos of their most intimate moments.
Sgarbi, a one-time Swiss banker, may have had vengeance as part of his motive.
Complicating matters, the sweet-texting gigolo had also seduced three other wealthy women, and had talked them out of a combined 10 million Euros (or $12.64 million).
The heiress – who holds a 12.5 percent stake in BMW and more than half the chemical company, Altana — decided to press charges, and Sgarbi’s trial was just beginning, on Monday, when he suddenly decided to plead guilty. Why? No one’s certain, though there was almost certainly some pressure to spare the normally secretive Klatten.
“I regret what I did,” the 44-year-old Sgarbi told a judge, in Munich. “I apologize to the women involved.” He was sentenced to six years in prison, over the objections of the local prosecutor, who sought a stiffer term, complaining that no accomplices had been brought to court and that the money had no been recovered.
Why was Klatten targeted? If the simple fact of her wealth wasn’t enough, there were reports, in European papers, that Sgarbi was seeking vengeance for the fact that his Jewish grandfather was forced into labor at Quandt factories during the Second World War. The family made a fortune supplying Nazi uniforms, and the first wife of Klatten’s grandfather, after their divorce, went on to marry Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
But at the abortive trial, no mention was made of revenge.