Although Gianni Agnelli left shares of Dicembre to his wife, his daughter, and his oldest grandson, he made it clear that his chosen business successor would be the grandson. real-estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield, among others. Dicembre controls Giovanni Agnelli & Company, a limited partnership which in turn controls a holding company called I.F.I., which in turn controls a $12 billion holding company called I.F.I.L., which owns a controlling 30 percent of Fiat Group, which owns Fiat Auto, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, and a majority of Ferrari, plus a diversified portfolio of holdings in the Juventus soccer team, Intesa Sanpaolo (Italy’s largest bank), and the U.S. This was what family members would later call “the crucial event,” which turned control of the convoluted, Chinese-box conglomeration of the Agnelli holding companies-designed to keep the business in family hands-over to John Elkann. Now, Margherita learned, Marella was donating her shares to John. When she walked into the meeting, she and her mother each owned 37 percent of the holding company Dicembre, which controls the family’s businesses, and John owned 25 percent. ‘And then something else happened, which was absolutely not in the norm of things,” Margherita says. When Margherita arrived at the notary’s office, a group was already gathered: her fragile and elderly mother, Marella her eldest son, John Elkann, the family’s crowned prince, who now, at 32, is the head of the Agnelli business empire the tall, stately Franzo Grande Stevens, at 79 Italy’s most powerful lawyer the 83-year-old Gianluigi Gabetti, only temporarily released from the hospital after a bout of pneumonia and two witnesses.įirst there was a reading of the so-called Monaco Letter, in which Gianni indicated his wish for John Elkann to take over the reins of the Agnelli empire. “I told him, ‘Look, do not ask me to sign any papers, because I really want to understand what I am signing and what I am agreeing to or not agreeing to.’ So he says to me, ‘Do not worry.’ There’s nothing that I have to sign.” Just before that meeting was to take place, she says, she called Gabetti. She promptly called Gabetti, her father’s longtime aide-de-camp, and asked him, “What was the need for things to go so quickly?” She says he told her not to worry everything would be cleared up in a month’s time, at a meeting before a notary in Turin. (It is not uncommon for a will to be opened without the heirs present.) “Your presence was not necessary,” she says Grande Stevens answered. Since the 2003 death of her father, Gianni Agnelli, the head of the Fiat car company, who was known as the unofficial king of Italy, Margherita, his only daughter and sole surviving child, has been trying to break down what she claims is a wall of secrecy and manipulation regarding his fortune. Today she is fighting the flu-she’s “full of aspirin,” she tells me-but then, fighting has become routine for her. The pastoral setting of the property, which horses, swans, and rabbits share with a kiwi farm, seems in direct contrast to the fiery mood of the tall, elegant, strawberry-blonde woman of 52 who lives here. “Come in,” she says, opening the door of her large and imposing château on the shore of Lake Geneva. Ironically, this mission has caused her to lose what she says matters most to her: her family. Not only has Margherita refused to disappear, but she is also staging a very public fight for what she claims is her just due: the right to know the full extent of her late father’s huge estate, estimated at between $3 billion and $5 billion. She will not jump off a bridge like her brother, Edoardo, or accidentally overdose like her son Lapo, or die tragically-and prematurely-like so many other members of her rich and powerful family, who are known as the Kennedys of Italy. Margherita Agnelli de Pahlen will not disappear.
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