The rise and fall of a rich German heiress

It is a story that could well be the plot for a kitschy Hollywood movie drama: Germany's richest woman, Susanne Klatten, 46, who inherited a fortune from her father, industrialist Herbert Quandt, and holds stakes in premium carmaker BMW and chemical company Altana, walked right into a delicate honey trap which eventually cost her Dh35.29 million (7.5 million Euros) in ransom.

Gulf News reported the news on Tuesday, November 4: German prosecutors have opened an investigation into allegations that Klatten was blackmailed for millions of Euros by an ex-lover who threatened to publish video footage of their secret intimate meetings in several hotel rooms throughout Europe.

Klatten, also the seventh-richest woman in the world, admitted to have already paid 7.5 million Euros to Swiss suspect Helg Sgarbi to avoid the publication of compromising film material and photos of the couple's relationship. The main part of the video footage was allegedly filmed by an Italian man and accomplice of Sgarbi in a Munich hotel, using a hidden camera from the next-door bedroom. Other parts were filmed in a Monte Carlo hotel room, police said.

Publicity-shy

The embarrassing story of the unobtrusive and publicity-shy heiress, whose personal fortune exceeds 8 billion Euros according to German monthly Manager Magazin (or even $13.2b according to Forbes), caused a stir in the German public. Newspapers started wondering what is really happening behind the glitzy facades of Germany's money elite and how it comes that a person like Klatten, a female role model of success in Germany's male-dominated industry, can fall that deep and totally ruin her - so far - immaculate image.

Klatten's father Herbert Quandt was one of the most successful industrialists in post-war Germany who build an industry conglomerate of more than 200 companies comprising a battery manufacturer, several metal fabrication companies, textile enterprises and chemical firms (including Altana). The Quandt Group also owned 10 per cent of the stakes of then Daimler-Benz (they later sold the stake to the government of Kuwait) and holds 30 per cent of BMW.

On her father's death in 1982, Susanne Klatten - she changed her name after she married former BMW apprentice Jan Klatten in 1990, the couple has three children - inherited 50.1 per cent of Altana and 12.5 per cent of BMW. She is member of both company's supervisory boards. But despite her important role in two of the top-30 German companies, Klatten and her husband led a quiet life with their children, were seldom seen at society events and were hardly ever a topic for gossip columns up to now.

But things have changed. The German press now took a closer look not only at Klatten's private life, but also at her managing performance in her two companies and rated it as more or less "representative".

According to other supervisory board members of Altana and BMW, who have been quoted by German newspapers under conditions of anonymity, Klatten - though a trained economist with an MBA - did very seldom interfere in the board discussions, was barely heard asking any questions and just signed off the necessary papers. "She is the classical heiress who makes the impression not to understand much of the business she is involved in," one board member said.

It's lonely at the top, as the saying goes. Klatten's private life was obviously more thrilling to her. And together with the embarrassing disclosures of her extramarital sex life, an old issue, which the entire Quandt family has been eager to bring to a close, now emerged again with the sex scandal: The Quandt family's role in Hitler's Nazi economy, a commonly known but, nevertheless, suppressed fact among Germany's business elite.

Interestingly enough, Susanne Klatten's ex-lover and blackmailer Sgarbi tried to justify his actions as a "revenge for the Quandt family's role during the Nazi era" when he eventually was seized in Austria in a joint operation between German and Italian police.

Family secrets

The background is that the foundations of the Quandt family's wealth were indeed laid by their role as business partners of the military-industrial complex of the Nazis before and during World War II. With Hitler's help, including the exploitation of concentration camp inmates as forced labourers for the Quandt's industries and the confiscation of industrial property in favour of the Quandt group, they were able to allocate large sums of money that finally allowed Herbert Quandt to buy the majority stake of the then ailing BMW company in the 1950s and invest into Altana.

From then on, the Quandt's wealth grew even more. Today, the whole Quandt family fortune is estimated to exceed 22 billion Euros. All those facts remained more or less a "family secret" or at least an unspoken fact until German TV station ARD in October 2007 aired a documentary that highlighted many surprising details of that era, causing four family members - on behalf of the entire Quandt family - to announce a research project in which a historian now is supposed to examine the family's activities under the Hitler regime.

Nevertheless, prosecutors are definitely unimpressed by Sgarbi's claims of a belated vendetta, given the fact that he tried to blackmail more money from Klatten, seemed to have similar "relationships" to other wealthy women in Europe, was apparently member of an Italian sex sect and used to spend the extorted money on luxury properties in Sharm Al Sheik, Egypt, invested the rest in offshore accounts and bought Ferrari and Rolls Royce cars. It's obviously not more than a petty excuse.