The Breakdown

The frustration and anguish are not hard to comprehend. After many months of illness, your father dies. Apart from your mother, his widow, you are the only direct heir still alive. Yet when the call comes from the family solicitor, it is not to invite you to the opening and reading out of the will - but to inform you that the will has already been unsealed and read out. To a select company from which you were excluded.

Why, you enquire politely, were you not invited to this event, one both sad and momentous, and that cannot be repeated? The solicitor, who is also an aged and distinguished family retainer, gives his answer: "Your presence, madam, was not required."

It would be a rude shock for anyone. And when your father has for decades been one of the richest and most powerful men in Europe, with a personal fortune regularly guessed at more than $2 billion (because no one knows, or at least no one is willing to declare, its true value), the shock and the offence would certainly be no less.

In essence, it is this offence that has blown apart one of the most prominent and, for many years, one of the most united business dynasties in Europe, the Agnellis: the founding family of the Fiat car empire; whose imperious father-figure Gianni Agnelli bestrode Italy like a Colossus, with nearly 200,000 workers on his books, with direct or indirect control of 25 per cent of the Italian stock market, responsible for some five per cent of Italy's gross domestic product.

Gianni Agnelli died of prostate cancer, aged 81, in January 2003. Following the suicide of her brother Edoardo three years earlier, Margherita Agnelli was Gianni's only living child, his only direct heir besides her mother Marella. Today she lives in Geneva with her second husband, Serge de Pahlen, a count of Russian origins. In this sprawling, vastly rich, frequently flamboyant and frequently tragic family, Margherita is a pillar of privacy and reserve. She has given only a handful of interviews in her life. She has a full head of red hair, an expression in photographs both old and recent suggesting a capacity for the sulks, a dislike, remarkable in her family, for ornament of any kind. She's an amateur painter, though she makes light of her efforts. She has put money into "microcredit schemes" for the poor and a home for Turin's street children which, when you are worth tens of millions, seems the least you can do. Perhaps her most striking gift is her fertility: she has produced eight children by two husbands.

And now she is clearly a very angry woman (though she denies it). In May this year her lawyers announced that, following the offence mentioned above and various others that followed it, she had decided to sue the two distinguished family retainers who have been consiglieri ("advisers") to the Agnellis for many years, and whose roles acquired critical importance during the handover that followed Gianni's death. Margherita de Pahlen, nee Agnelli, feels she has been shut out of her family's secrets and she is not going to stand for it.

"I am in need of information," she told Italy's Panorama news weekly in June this year. "I have never received, despite repeated requests, the details of the inheritance of Gianni Agnelli. I only ask - I who am, along with my mother, the only direct heir - to be told the situation regarding the inheritance left by my father. Because I have not been told it."

When Gianni died, Italy, Turin in particular, went into mourning because, in the cliche, he had been Italy's uncrowned king ever since the real one was shunted aside to make way for a republic in 1946. For most of the 20th century Fiat had been the pre-eminent symbol of Italian pride; even in decline it had a special place in their affections.

At her home across the border in Switzerland, Margherita waited by the phone. Finally it rang and, as described above, it was the man she had been waiting to hear from: Franzo Grande Stevens, the 74- year-old Turin lawyer who had been one of Gianni Agnelli's trusted fixers for many years. "On 30 January [2003] if I am not mistaken," she told Panorama, "Grande Stevens telephoned and told me that the next day he would have a meeting with my mother. The fact was that he had already opened the safe: my father's will had already been opened: and I was not present at the time."

Didn't you ask, the Panorama interviewer wondered, why all of this had been done without you, the only daughter of Gianni?

Margherita: Certainly I asked.

Interviewer: And what did he reply?

Margherita: He replied that my presence was not necessary.

It was an inauspicious start.

A full month after Agnelli's death, the key dramatis personae finally assembled in the office of a notary in Turin: Margherita; her mother, Marella; her son John (known to all as Jacki, pronounced "Yaki"), now vice-chairman of Fiat; Grande Stevens; Gianluigi Gabetti, the other family adviser, four years older than Stevens; two witnesses. Gianni Agnelli had left only a partial will, detailing his assets within Italy but saying nothing about those abroad. At the meeting, this will was presented for their endorsement. But Margherita, and Margherita alone, refused to sign it.