BMW Heiress Gets Conned By Pretend Milk Tray Man
There’s a big sexy scandal for BMW heiress and Germany’s richest woman Susanne Klatten, as former Swiss investment banker Helg Sgarbi was sentenced to six years in jail for defrauding her and three other women of millions of Euros.
Sgarbi’s ploy involved secretly making John Leslie-style tapes of him with billionaire heiresses, then threatening to release the tape if they didn’t cough up the dough. And what a lot of dough it was too – phone conversations with Klatten involved the code word ‘Seven Up’, in reference to the €7 million she was to deliver in a cardboard box to the underground garage of a Munich hotel. After this installment, Sgarbi got some big ideas, and demanded ‘seven times seven up’ or €49million. At which point Klatten got pissed off and went to the police.
The whole drama is like a bad 24 spin-off series or an X-rated Milk Tray ad, with Sgarbi seducing Klatten and three other women by claiming to be a secret agent, then later saying he needed the bribe money because he had caused a car accident in which the daughter of a US mafia don had been seriously injured. Mafia don? Car accident? Secret agent? Sounds hot and feasible!
Sgarbi employed Nazi defender Egon Geiss as his lawyer, which prompted a lot of media ballyhoo about Nazi connections. Geiss’s speciality is implementing the German rule forcing a witness to testify (hopefully by saying “ve haf vays of making you talk”) – a bit of a worry for the usually ‘reclusive’ Klatten. Thankfully for Klatten though, the drama hasn’t escalated, as Sgarbi promptly confessed on the first day of the trial.
Sgarbi’s signed off with a shot at gentlemanliness: ”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. Which is a bit rich, given he has already disrespected them pretty heavily by filming sexytimes without asking, and threatened to leak it to their families and companies. The man from Milk Tray would never have done that.
But Sgarbi’s mafia/secret agent claims pale in comparison to that of recently jailed small-time fraudster Jeremy Scott, who extracted around £220,000 from women who weren’t nearly so flush as Klatten. Scott’s claims involved having 200 houses, “partying” with Gordon Ramsay, being bezzie mates with Ryan Giggs and supplying wine to Alex Ferguson – that’s when he wasn’t helping Simon Cowell to ‘make it’ of course. All the more surprising that the women believed these claims, given that the image dug up by the Telegraph shows him as closely resembling a builder in a posh shirt.
Anyway, while BMW continues to choke amid the recession, Klatten can get back to obscurity. The question remains just how a bunch of intelligent women like Klatten got taken in by Sgarbi – did it really seem like a good idea to get sexy with someone claiming to be a secret agent when you’re married with children AND the 55th richest person in the world? Didn’t you see this coming – even a little bit?
Posted by Jennifer Allan in Hot Money | March 10, 2009 3:23PM |