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.
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