A long-running family feud makes its way to the courts in Bermuda shortly, when the engineering and steel magnate, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kaszon, generally known as Heini and one of the world's great art collectors, embarks on a battle with his oldest son, Georg or Heini junior, to regain control of his multi-million pound empire. The Baron, who handed over the running of the family's Thyssen-Bornemisza group (TBG) of companies to his son and the Bermuda-based Continuity Trust in 1983 to allow himself more time to concentrate on his art collection, now accuses his son of failing to manage it efficiently and of misappropriating £350 million from the family coffers, thereby jeopardising the collection. For a man who once boasted that he had "£50 million a year to spend - that's £30 million on my collection and £20 million on myself" - to find himself without the odd million to support a jet-setting lifestyle and houses in Paris, Madrid, Marbella, London, Switzerland, New York, Jamaica and the Costa Brava it is a great problem. The now ailing Baron Heini was the fourth and youngest child born in the Netherlands to Dutch-Hungarian parents, Heinrich Thyssen and Margritte Bornemisza, in 1921. They took out Swiss nationality and moved to Lugano, with the basis of the art collection, in the 1930s to avoid the threat of the Nazis.
Family feuds are nothing new in the litigious Thyssen family. The four sons of August Thyssen, grandfather of the present Baron, fought in the courts for many years over their inheritance after his death in 1911. His father, Heinrich senior, opposed the Nazis, while his uncle Fritz was a Hitler supporter and saw much of his wealth confiscated after the war. On Heinrich senior's death in 1947 he willed his entire collection of more than 400 Old Masters to his oldest son Stefan because he did not want it to be divided into four lots. Heini and his sisters contested the will and eventually inherited a quarter share each. He proceeded to buy many of the works from his siblings as well as hundreds more paintings and art works of all periods to build up what is arguably the largest private collection in the world, rivalling even, it is said, that of Queen Elizabeth.
While living the life of an old-style playboy and accumulating works of art as if in a game of monopoly, Heini also accumulated a string of wives and five children. His first wife was Austrian princess Maria Therese de Lippe, who bore him his first son, Georg or Heini junior, 48, and the subject of this the imminent court hearings. After his divorce from Princess de Lippe, Heini married British model Nina Dyer, famous for travelling with her string of black panthers, which regularly wrecked every hotel room they stayed in.
There were no children from that marriage which only lasted a year. Dyer subsequently married Prince Saddrudin Khan, brother of the Aga Khan, and later died of a drug overdose. His third marriage, to the Scottish model Fiona Campbell-Walter, produced a daughter, Francesca, now aged 40, and a son, Lorne, 36, but like the others, it too was short-lived, with Baroness Fiona complaining that her life was like that of a bird in a gilded cage.
Next on the list was the Brazilian beauty Denise Shorto, 20 years his junior, who officially gave him his fourth son, Alexander, 22, although doubts have been expressed as to whether Heini was really his father. The marriage ended after 17 years, most of it spent with the couple living on different continents, in a bitter divorce, with Shorto reportedly receiving a settlement of over £100 million.
In the early 1980s the Baron met his current wife, Carmen Cervera, a 55-ish former Miss Spain, known as Tita, whose ambitions and pushy personality have been blamed for the present troubles which have split the family. Until his death in 1970 Tita was married to the American actor Lex Barker, famous for his role as Tarzan. A later marriage to a South American playboy, Espartaco Santoni, was declared bigamous since Santoni had failed to divorce his previous wife. In 1980 Tita had a son, Borja, whose father has never been named, although he has since been legally adopted by the Baron and accepted as his fifth child. He is a generous stepfather, and once gave the young Borja a Goya painting as a birthday present - history does not relate whether the child would have preferred the latest computer game or toy train set instead.
By the late 1980s the Baron's collection had grown to more than 1,500 works and his main residence in the the Villa La Favorita in Lugano, was rapidly becoming overcrowded. He began to think about new or larger premises to house them and commissioned the British architect James Stirling to draw up plans for a new wing to exhibit some 400 paintings for public viewing. The plans were ambitious - and expensive - and from an original budget of 10 or 15 million Swiss francs costs spiralled closer to 40 million. While the Baron has always been generous in lending his paintings to exhibitions and other museums, he felt that the Swiss government should contribute towards the cost of the new building.
Once the news was out that he was considering moving his collection out of Switzerland, many governments rushed to woo the Baron. Margaret Thatcher offered him a site on Canary Wharf in London's Docklands; Prince Charles even flew over to Switzerland to add weight to that claim, and at the same time President Mitterand put in his own bid to place the new museum in Paris.
But Baroness Tita is a determined woman - she once said of herself: "I am a Taurus, and a very stubborn one at that" - and she wanted the collection to be housed in her native Spain. In 1988 she persuaded her husband to accept the Spanish government's offer to revamp the 18th-century Villahermosa Palace, alongside the Prado Museum, to house the 750 paintings which comprised half his collection. Originally the price was $5 million a year rental until a final purchase price could be agreed. Four years later the Spanish government agreed to pay $350 million to buy the collection. As a sop to Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher, the Baron agreed to loan the Holbein portrait of Henry VIII (the only one painted of the monarch from life) for exhibition in Britain, although it now hangs in the Villahermosa. Even here, Tita's stubborn streak came to the fore; against the advice of the architect she insisted that the floors be clad in pink marble and the walls in a pale terracotta red.
Even before her marriage in 1985 Tita was a regular star of Spanish society columns and gossip magazines. Nude photographs of a heavily pregnant Tita, taken shortly before the birth of Borja, were touted around for sale to the highest bidder. At least one of them found a buyer and was published in a Spanish magazine. No sooner had she married her Baron than Tita began to build up her own art collection to rival that of her husband. She has been recognised as a canny purchaser with a good eye. It is a very wideranging collection of more than 700 paintings, including Zurbaran, Matisse, Goya to Picasso.
At the same time she has become an expert in late 19th and early 20th-century Spanish painters and her collection includes several works by Sorollo and Zuloaga. She recently remarked that the Villahermosa Palace was becoming too overcrowded to hold her collection alongside that of her husband's and that they were considering the purchase of an adjoining building.
With the emergence of Tita into the family, the rows grew more bitter by the day. When the Baron handed over the running of the business to his son, he made it clear he expected to be paid regularly from the trust. He now recognises he had made a mistake and said recently: "I would not advise anyone to do what I did. You should never give out legacies before you are dead."
In 1996, at his 75th birthday celebration in his Swiss palace - the last time the whole family were together - he made one last attempt to regain control. In an open letter to his children he told them: "It has always been my intention that each of my children should obtain an equal share of my assets on my death. At present Heini junior has manoeuvred himself into a position where in the absence of action on my part he would get far too much. I will be claiming the return of my interest in the TBG Group of Companies together with a claim for compensation." The flame-haired Francesca, a one-time regular of the London club scene, has sided with her brother Heini junior in the legal battle. She has a colourful past, and was once photographed at a ball in Venice when a gust of wind revealed that she had forgotten to wear any underwear beneath her Versace gown. In 1993 she married Archduke Karl von Hapsburg, grandson of the former Emperor Karl of Austria. In spite of her great wealth, her pedigree was not considered grand enough for some of the aristocratic Hapsburgs, who refused their wedding invitations. But "Chessie" as she is known to her friends, is a reformed character, model wife and mother who devotes herself to saving artistic heritage of Eastern Europe. She is known to dislike her stepmother and complained to a German newspaper when the art collection was sold to Spain. "I always regarded it as our property, and it was a great emotional loss when my father sold it."
Her brother Lorne, a convert to Islam, keeps away from the quarrels and spends much of his time in Beirut. He and the half-Brazilian Alexander are said to remain neutral in the row, although he could easily be persuaded to take sides against his stepmother. The young Borja is rarely seen far from his mother's side, and there seems little chance he would ever go against her strong will.
The Baron, who suffered after a heart operation two years ago which left him with a partly paralysed left arm and leg, is in frail health and is forced to rely increasingly on his wife to defend his interests or represent him in public. She shrugs off the family legal problems, asking, "Do you know of any family which remained close where there is money involved?" This forthcoming case in Hamilton, Bermuda, is expected to last well into the millennium and could easily outlive many of its principal characters. The main beneficiaries are likely to be the large team of lawyers representing both sides. From the High Court in Bermuda it will probably go to the Appeals Court before ending up at the Privy Council in London, continuing the Thyssen tradition of legal battles.