The wife of the Formula One tycoon Bernie Ecclestone confirmed yesterday that she is leaving her husband after 24 years of marriage.
Divorce lawyers said that their settlement could break all records as the former model and mother of the motor racing chief’s two daughters sought her share of the family billions.
Much of the family wealth is believed to be held by Mrs Ecclestone in a trust that also owns just under 10 per cent of Formula One. This has prompted speculation that Mr Ecclestone, 78, who has run the sport since the early 1980s and has managed repeatedly to sell off parts of his stake without ceding operational control, could find himself fighting his wife for his share of his own money.
Friends of Mrs Ecclestone said she believed that her husband would be keen to avoid a legal battle in which his affairs would be pored over in open court. It is not known if the couple signed a prenuptial agreement. “She’s going to hang on to what she’s got,” a friend said. “The settlement is going to be kept absolutely hush-hush. She’s got so much on him that he will not want to go to court.”
Media reports suggest that the Croatian former model moved out of the family home in Chelsea, an affluent part of west London, the weekend of the Brazilian Grand Prix, when Lewis Hamilton became F1 world champion.
Mr Ecclestone said his wife had moved out of their £10 million Chelsea home because the next door neighbours were ripping their house apart.
“The neighbours where we are in our house, they have taken the inside of their house to pieces,” he said. “It was supposed to have been done in eight months and it is still going on.
“Before, I didn’t care too much, but she said this family is driving me mad and I am going to move out. I said I didn’t blame her as I am still in the house and it is a nightmare - I wouldn’t want to stay in that house all day.”
Mr. Ecclestone is worth an estimated £2.4 billion with properties all over the world, a Falcon jet, a 190ft yacht and part ownership in Queens Park Rangers football club.
But the 78-year-old could be in line for an incredibly expensive payout as many of his assets are in his wife Slavica’s name.
UPDATE: November 24, 2008 10:19 pm
I’ve always wondered what 6ft-tall former Croatian model Slavica Ecclestone saw in 5ft 2ins motor racing billionaire Bernie.
Actually, not only “what ” she saw in him, but “how” she saw him!
However, their unlikely pairing has lasted rather longer than most would have anticipated . . . about 24 years longer to be precise.
Bernie and Slavica met at the Monza racetrack in northern Italy in 1981. She was a dockworker’s daughter from the former Yugoslavia, who had landed a modelling job, first with a Zagreb fashion studio, and later at Giorgio Armani’s couture house in Milan. Blonde and willowy, she cut a striking presence beside the bespectacled Englishman, who was more than twice her age and barely half her height.
Neither spoke a word of the other’s language, and while Ecclestone was consumed with the geeky complexities of racing cars, Slavica knew and cared for little beyond the vanities of fashion. Their romance was slow to catch fire, but Bernie, as is his way, refused to be beaten, sending her letters and flowers from all over the world, and in 1984 they were married. When asked, years later, why Slavica accepted his proposal, Bernie shrugged: “Why not? She’d have been wrong not to.” Two daughters, Tamara, 24, and Petra, 20, followed.
In 1978, he became chief executive of the Formula One Constructors’ Association (FOCA), skirmishing throughout the Eighties with the rival Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile, before effectively taking control of the whole circus. He brilliantly promoted F1 not just as a sport but as a brand, making it enormously valuable to sponsors and advertisers, and spreading the Grand Prix circuit to new parts of the world. By the late Nineties, Bernie possessed Britain’s largest self-made fortune.
A million pounds of it went as a donation to the newly elected Labour Party. When it later emerged that Tony Blair had supported F1’s Ecclestone-led campaign for an exemption from the tobacco advertising ban, he was given the money back. And he has, he swears, been more careful with it since.
But divorce is a costly business, and Bernie, while rarely averse to a fight, is unlikely to relish one that risks spilling the details of a marriage he has largely succeeded in keeping private. When the news of Slavica’s action broke last week, he protested that he didn’t know anything about it, and suggested that she had moved out to escape the noise of the builders next door. Was this the voice of a man too busy to notice that his marriage had collapsed? Or another of Bernie’s fast ones?
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