In the Agnelli family, the uncrowned kings of Italy and one of the most powerful industrial dynasties in Europe, sentiments have been buried for years by ambition, balances of power, luxury goods, untold wealth and stocks. billionaires. The armed peace that maintained the lineage in recent times has been blown up again. The enormous fortune left by the patriarch Gianni Agnelli, once the most powerful man in Italy, has been the subject of friction in the clan in the past and now the fuse has been reignited.
In 2003, when the
Avvocato
passed away
, a nickname by which everyone knew Gianni Agnelli, the
vain
playboy
who reinvented Fiat, his daughter Margherita started a fierce struggle for inheritance with the rest of the family, with whom today she has no contact . A year later, after an arduous negotiation, he signed an agreement with the other heirs, his mother and the children of his first marriage Lapo, Ginevra and John Elkann, by which he renounced the shares of the family company, which at that time was It peered into the abyss and today it has become a prosperous colossus. In return, he would receive a large sum of money that was around 1,300 million euros.
Now, Margherita returns to the charge and, according to the Italian local media, she has challenged that pact because she considers that the figure is currently inadequate, too low taking into account the value that those actions that she refused have reached today.
The economic appraisal of the group at the time the agreement with Fiat, the main company of the family, was signed, in the midst of the crisis, was very different from the current one. The family company now owns a succulent part of the automotive giant Stellantis and the majority of Ferrari, in addition to the Juventus football club of Turin or the Gedi publishing group, with national newspapers such as
La Repubblica
. “Margherita has never accepted the fact that she made a mistake in signing that agreement, which on the other hand, contemplated the option of challenging it only within one year. Now he cannot regret eighteen years later just because the group's financial situation is much better, ”journalist Gigi Moncalvo, one of the best connoisseurs of the Agnelli family and its infinite ins and outs, tells this newspaper.
When Margherita resigned the shares, they passed from her mother, Marella Caracciolo, Agnelli's widow, who passed away in 2019, to her first-born son, John Elkann, the universal heir to the empire, born from her marriage to Alain Elkann and who is currently President and CEO of the family business group. Most of the properties also passed into his name.
Margherita, turned into something of an outcast by the Agnellis, has five more children with her second husband, the Russian count Serge de Pahlen, with whom she lives in Switzerland and whose surname she adopted after marrying. His extensive descent is part of the origin of family discord, since it hurts Margherita that John has never taken all his siblings into account and that only the Elkann occupy positions of relevance in the family companies. And he claims the same treatment for his eight children. The gap with the family is also related in part to Margherita's deep disagreements with her father's economic advisers, who are now her son's and whom she accuses of hiding the existence of assets that were not declared at the time of the murder. signature of the agreement. "Maybe because I'm from another generation because they think,with all her good faith, that a woman should not stick her nose in the accounts ”, he complained on occasion.
Moncalvo, author of several unauthorized biographies of the kings of Italy, such as
I Lupi e gli Agnelli
(
The wolves and the Agnelli -
in Italian the surname means "lambs" -),
Agnelli Segreti
(
The Secret Agnelli
) or
I Caracciolo
, considers that money is at the base of the family war.
“Margherita continues to insist on ending that agreement because she considers that her mother tried to favor a part of her grandchildren and not all.
He always suspected that his mother stole the money that belonged to him from his father, but this theory has to be proven.
And he adds: “It is a family deprived of feelings, it is demonstrated by the fact that a grandmother leaves an inheritance inheritance only to three of her grandchildren and forgets another five.
They are atavistic problems that come from tensions maintained for a long time ”.
The tug of war between mother and children Elkann has been going on for decades.
The Italian newspaper
La Repubblica
, owned by the Agnellis, cites legal sources close to the Elkann family who emphasize that the sale of the shares that was signed more than a decade ago would not be reversible and that Margherita's claims cannot call into question the absolute majority of shares held by John, the business leader and family benchmark. "Margherita de Pahlen has been trying to challenge the agreements on the succession of her father and mother for about fifteen years, which she wanted and signed in 2004 and which provided her with an estate of about 1.3 billion at that time alone," the lawyers have pointed out. daily. And they have added:“Margherita's attempts to challenge her parents' succession are manifestly unfounded and completely contrary to both the will of her father and mother and the agreements that she herself signed. In fact, none of them have been successful. These reckless assertions will be firmly refuted in all appropriate forums ”.
Margherita has always tried to challenge the inheritance agreement. First, he tried to accuse the mother of having tricked her into signing the pact and to hide from her the real value of the family fortune; later he opened, unsuccessfully, a battle that he lost in the Italian courts. Instead, the process, although stalled, remains open in a Geneva court. His last attempt, a few years ago, was to cling to "formal errors" in the drafting of the document.
Since Gianni's death, Margherita has lived practically apart from the family.
"I do not know my grandchildren and they do not consider me a grandmother," he has lamented on occasion.
In this time, mother and children have hardly spoken and all kinds of knives have been thrown.
Although they reached a truce shortly before the death of Marella Agnelli when John agreed to allow the daughter to see the mother before she died and there was a forced rapprochement between both parties.
Margherita Agnelli was very close to her brother Edoardo, who died in 2000 after falling from a bridge in Turin and who had been practically disinherited.
Being the children of Gianni Agnelli, at the head of the tricky family genealogical tree, and living in the shadow of his myth was not easy.