ROME [www.reuters.com] – An Italian man denied on Tuesday accusations that he filmed secret sex videos used in the attempted blackmail of the heiress to the BMW car empire.
Ernano Barretta said one million euros found in his country home in Italy were his “life savings” and not part of the money that German heiress Susanne Klatten [pictured] paid to former banker Helg Sgarbi after Sgarbi seduced her.
Klatten gave Sgarbi 7 million euros, believing he needed the money to avoid jail for paralysing a child in a traffic accident. He later threatened to send photos and tapes of their lovemaking to her family unless she paid him 49 million euros.
Two weeks after Sgarbi was jailed for six years, Barretta, who faces trial accused of being his accomplice, attended a preliminary hearing in the Italian city of Pescara over charges of fraud, criminal association and extortion.
But the hearing was suspended until April after the judge was removed over an earlier comment prejudicial to the case.
The 63-year-old Italian, who runs a small religious sect and says he has healing powers, is accused of filming Sgarbi while he had sex with Klatten, Germany’s richest woman, and other rich women, whom he persuaded to pay him almost 10 million euros.
Klatten belongs to the Quandt family who are the leading shareholders in BMW. The 46-year-old married mother of three went public last year with the story of how her lover demanded tens of millions of euros not to reveal the secret footage.
“I love Germany and my friend Helg Sgarbi who has been arrested,” Barretta told reporters at the Pescara courthouse. “I love them all in a clean way and don’t like what has been said about me. It is all false and we will show this in the trial.”
He had “never seen” Klatten or the other women, Barretta said, adding that the million euros police found in his house was from 19,000 clients who visited his healing centre, “which I kept under the mattress because I’m not putting it in the bank”.
His attorney, Carlo Taormina, said the only evidence against him were phone calls from Sgarbi while Sgarbi’s victims had said “they never met Barretta and didn’t recognise him in photos”. (Writing by Stephen Brown; Editing by Dominic Evans)