A former banker apologized on Monday to a string of wealthy women after he admitted duping Germany’s richest woman and other victims out of millions of euros.
A Munich court sentenced Helg Sgarbi, 44, to six years in prison for fraud, attempted fraud and attempted blackmail after he admitted fleecing Susanne Klatten, 46, the heir of carmaker BMW, out of 7 million euros (US$8.89 million), and another three women out of about 3 million euros. They included Swiss Countess Verena du Pasquier-Geubels, 50 years his senior, who owned a chateau on the banks of Lake Geneva, and a British woman, identified as “Alice T.,” whom he visited in Antibes, France, at her holiday home.
The guilty plea by Sgarbi, a former specialist in mergers and acquisitions at the investment bank Credit Suisse, saved the billionaire Klatten from the humiliation of having to give evidence in court.
“I deeply regret what has happened and apologize before this court and the public to these wronged women,” Sgarbi said.
He had earlier posed with a broad smile for the 150 journalists in the court.
Sgarbi, who has been nicknamed the “Swiss gigolo” by the media, wooed the women after meeting them in health spas and boasted to police that he could “read women like a map: Everything is signposted, each turn in the road.”
Posing as a special Swiss representative in crisis zones, he extorted more than 9 million euros from Klatten and two other women within 18 months. He told them all variations on a story that he had knocked a child over in a car accident and needed millions to cover his legal fees. The women fell for his tale.
Klatten, a member of the Quandt dynasty who sits on the board of BMW and chemicals firm Altana, was Sgarbi’s biggest conquest.
During the investigation she told police she had met him in the garage of a hotel to hand over 7 million euros in a cardboard box.
They first met at an exclusive health resort in Innsbruck, Austria, in July 2007, allegedly beginning an affair in the south of France the following month, and later meeting in Munich for an intimate encounter that either Sgarbi or an accomplice is believed to have filmed.
After she called off the relationship, Sgarbi tried to defraud Klatten of a further 49 million euros by threatening to send a 38-minute DVD of their tryst to the board of BMW, her family and the press.
In her only interview so far, given shortly after the case came to light, Klatten, a woman whose face was virtually unknown in Germany before the scandal, said that when it became obvious Sgarbi was trying to blackmail her “that was a moment of clarity: You are now a victim and you must defend yourself.”
The state prosecutor in the case, Thomas Steinkrauss-Koch, sought a nine-year prison sentence, asking Sgarbi: “Where is the money? Where are the tapes? And who are the accomplices?”
Judge Gilbert Wolf said Sgarbi’s guilty plea saved him from a longer sentence, but recommended he serve the full term because of the issue of the missing 7 million euros as well as the DVD.
Defending Sgarbi, Egon Geis said that Klatten, who is married with three children, had handed over the money of her own free will.
The case was “not comparable with blackmailing supermarket chains by putting poison in the foodstuffs,” Geis said.
German investigators said Sgarbi’s accomplice is alleged to be a former second-hand car dealer called Ernano Barretta, the head of an obscure pseudo-Catholic sect run in the Abruzzo region in Italy.
Barretta, 63, claims to have walked on water and to bear stigmata. He allegedly has about 30 disciples who commit their earnings to him, and Sgarbi was said by former members of the sect to have been his right-hand man.
Barretta, who denies involvement, is under house arrest and a court case against him for allegedly forming a criminal organization, fraud and attempted blackmail is expected to go ahead this year.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS