I’m not talking about exploring your driving passions on a meandering S-curve road with a new BMW motorcycle, rather I’m talking about a come-clean Eliot Spitzer “moment” from Germany’s wealthiest woman. 

It’s a script right out of a movie — a tale of how lovers filmed their hotel trysts and one of the parties demanded millions of $$ to not reveal them.  Sort of a “One-Night in Paris” do-over, but ultimately it’s called blackmail?  Hey, you can’t make up drama this good! 

The woman is Susanne Klatten, a member of the Quandt family, who owns a 12.5% stake in BMW and is on the supervisory board.  She also owns just over half of the chemical company Altana AG.  The press reported that Klatten, a 46-year-old married mother-of-three, first met Helg Sgarbi a 43-year-old Swiss man at a hotel bar. In a weak moment Mr. Sgarbi embellished his bio by describing himself as a multilingual special envoy for war zones, although in reality he sold chicken at a fast food stand.  Not what you’d call on a career “fast-track”, but at least he wasn’t on drugs, broke and homeless like Ashley Dupre the call girl who brought down the Governor of NY (Spitzer).

The meetings, including hotel-room rendezvous, were secretly filmed by an accomplice and used in an attempt to extort millions from the family.  Ms Klatten paid the blackmailers $15 million to prevent the release of the tape and photos before additional requests for greater amounts ($51M) followed.   She then decided to file a legal complaint with the state prosecutors in Munich.

And if this news wasn’t sleazy enough, it turns out the Quandt family had ties to the Nazi party and built its fortune supplying German army and railway worker uniforms. Klatten’s grandfather’s first wife went on to marry Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.  After a television program revealed that forced labor had been used in their factories as part of the Nazi war effort the family pledged a full investigation into the matter. 

I’m sure she will have the best attorney’s money can buy.  And she can buy a lot because her wealth is estimated by Forbes magazine at almost $10 billion, making her the 68th richest person in the world.  Oh the petty sex troubles of the rich and famous…

Postscript: not letting any of this slow down her business savvy, Klatten announced over the weekend she will pay $1.2B to buy the other half of the chemical company Altana AG that she did not already own.  BMW reported a year-over-year decline of 10.5% in retail sales.

Klatten photo courtesy Uwe Lein (AP) and BMW Motorcycle web site.