The Formula One tycoon Bernie Ecclestone faces an unprecedented battle to win back his own fortune in the courts after his wife of 24 years, Slavica, announced today that she is to divorce him.

The former Croatian model, who is ten inches taller than her husband even before she puts on her heels, moved out of the family home in Chelsea last month while her husband was at the season-ending Brazilian Grand Prix in Sao Paulo.

Mr Ecclestone played down the split and let it be known that she was upset by noise from building works in the basement of the house next door. In fact, as it became clear today, she was already lining up lawyers.

“Prompted by media speculation it is formally announced that Mrs Slavica Ecclestone has filed for divorce,” her spokesman said this afternoon. “Mrs Ecclestone has asked that her privacy and that of her children should be respected.”

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The remains of a billionaire whose family fortune was built on Nazi slave labour have been stolen from an Austrian graveyard.

Industrialist Friedrich Karl Flick, who lived in fear of being kidnapped, was 79 when he died in 2006.

An oak coffin containing the remains was taken from his family’s mausoleum at a cemetery at Velden am Woertherse in what police believe may be an attempt to extort money from his widow.

The graverobbers struck last weekend but the theft was discovered yesterday. A stonemason hired to repair Mr Flick’s gravestone, which had been damaged by vandals, noticed that the marble slab in the mausoleum had been moved.

Gottlieb Tuerk, of the police in Carinthia, said: ‘The background to this remains murky at present.’

Police estimate it would have taken at least six men to disinter the remains. The coffin alone weighed more than 18 stone.

Mr Flick’s children and his widow

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This year, Alwaleed’s investments aren’t keeping pace with regional benchmarks, let alone Buffett. His Riyadh-based Kingdom Holding Co. has slumped 63 percent — more than Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul All-Share Index or Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. — wiping out $13 billion in value. Kingdom today said Alwaleed will boost his Citigroup stake, his largest holding, to 5 percent, even after the shares fell more than 80 percent since Jan. 1. 

Alwaleed and his companies are buying Citigroup shares because the prince believes they are “dramatically undervalued,” Kingdom Holding said in a news release. The combined stake stands at less than 4 percent after recent Citigroup share sales diluted the holding, Kingdom said.

“Prince Alwaleed is fully confident that Citigroup’s universal banking model and global franchise will make it a long- term winner in the financial services industry,” Kingdom said.

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“The banking crisis and turbulence on the financial markets led to a liquidity shortage at VEM,” Ludwig Merckle, head of the company, said in the statement. “The first goal is to stabilize the short-term financial situation. Over the medium-term, VEM must examine all options on how it can reduce debts.”

His father, Adolf Merckle, 74, heads an empire spanning the cement, machinery and pharmaceuticals industries. The elder Merckle made personal guarantees from his $9.2 billion fortune to the banks to try to secure funding, three people familiar with the situation said. VEM lost “low three-digit million euros” on VW stock, and banks demanded more guarantees from the company after shares used as loan collateral declined in value, it said.

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Berkshire has posted four straight profit declines, the worst streak in at least 13 years, on falling returns at insurance businesses and investment losses. Buffett, ranked by Forbes magazine as the richest American, has committed at least $28 billion this year to acquire companies, finance buyouts and purchase securities as prices fell and competitors were hobbled by limited access to credit.

Berkshire’s shareholder equity, a measure of assets minus liabilities, fell by about $9 billion in October on declines in debt and equity markets, the firm said Nov. 7. American Express Co., the credit-card company that is one of Berkshire’s top 10 stock holdings, plunged 47 percent since Sept. 30 as borrower defaults increased. Wells Fargo & Co., Berkshire’s No. 2 investment, dropped about 35 percent.

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Falcone, 46, who oversees $20 billion in assets, lost about 18 percent so far in his flagship fund after being up about 42 percent in the first half of the year. The unrealized Navistar losses could be reversed if Navistar’s stock rebounds. That’s not likely any time soon, said Walter Liptak, an analyst at Barrington Research Associates in Chicago.

“With the truck market’s collapse and the trucker net income being what it is and finance being what it is, the outlook is pretty dreary,” Liptak said. Navistar is the world’s fourth-ranked truck maker and produces diesel engines for Ford Super Duty trucks.

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“That’s just so stupid,” said Mohnish Pabrai, head of Pabrai Investment Funds and a Berkshire shareholder. The swap buyers are projecting “present circumstances into infinity” and concluding Buffett’s bet will cost the company $40 billion, Pabrai said. “It will never happen,” he said.

For the swaps to pay off, Berkshire would have to exhaust its $33.4 billion cash hoard, and Buffett’s decades-long record as the world’s most successful investor would have to come to a cataclysmic end. President-elect Barack Obama seeks him out for advice and the world’s biggest firms, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and General Electric Co., turned to Berkshire for capital and the prestige that comes with Buffett’s backing.

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Mr Zaleski has become one of the biggest investors in the Milan stock market in recent years through Carlo Tassara, a former steel company that has become his chief Italian investment vehicle. But sharp falls in bank share prices have seen the value of his investments sink, forcing him to seek an accommodation with his creditors.

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Adolf Merckle, 74, whose estimated $9.2 billion fortune puts him 94th on Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people this year, needs financing after losing as much as 700 million euros on wrong-way bets on VW stock and the value of HeidelbergCement AG, which it owns, plunged, the people said. A failure of VEM could have repercussions for Merckle’s holdings, which span as many as 30 companies in the cement, machinery and pharmaceutical industries, said the people.

Merckle may be forced to sell assets including German generics drugmaker Ratiopharm GmbH, the people said. A group of about 40 banks are being led by Commerzbank AG, Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, Deutsche Bank AG and HVB Group, the people said. RBS of Edinburgh may not agree to the standstill agreement, the people said.

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“Jerry and the Board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level,” Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock said.

“We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo as a key executive and member of the Board,” he added in a statement.

Yahoo said Yang , who founded the popular Web portal in 1995 at the age of 26 with Stanford University classmate David Filo and became a billionaire when it went public the next year, would remain in a strategic role at the company.

Yang said it was time to turn Yahoo, whose share price has plunged during the past year, over to a new leader.

“From founding this company to guiding its growth into a trusted global brand that is indispensable to millions of people, I have always sought to do what is best for our franchise,” Yang said in a statement.

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Cuban, one of the five finalists to buy the Chicago Cubs pro baseball team, faces civil charges by acting on nonpublic information and selling his entire stake in Mamma.com to avoid more than $750,000 in losses, the SEC alleged.

Cuban, listed by Forbes magazine as one of the 400 richest Americans with an estimated net worth of $2.6 billion, said he intends to contest the allegations. On his blog, Cuban said the matter has no merit and is the result of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion.

Calls to Cuban’s lawyers were not immediately returned.

According to the SEC, Quebec-based Mamma.com invited Cuban in June 2004 to participate in a private placement stock offering after he agreed to keep the information confidential.

When Cuban found out that the offering would dilute the holdings of existing shareholders and be sold at a discount to the market price, he became “angry and upset,” the SEC said.

At the end of a call with Mamma.com’s chief executive, Cuban said: “Well, now I’m screwed. I can’t sell,” according to the SEC’s complaint.

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From private jets to luxury mansions, Russia’s super-rich enjoy flaunting their toys. Sergei Rodionov, a banker, has taken this habit to new extremes by publishing a book of photographs dedicated to the carnal appeal of Olga, his wife.

The Book of Olga is largely the work of Bettina Rheims, the French photographer whose previous assignments included Jacques Chirac’s official portrait. The former French president might blush at her latest efforts.

Rheims has photographed Olga, 34, in a variety of erotic poses, none of them involving much in the way of clothing. Her husband initially wanted to keep the photographs for himself, but liked them so much that he decided to share them with a global audience.

“He loves the photographic art,” said Olga. “He loves me. He likes to call me Galatea in reference to the Greek artist Pygmalion, who created a statue so lifelike that he fell in love with it [Galatea].”

Olga, a business school graduate and chat show host with a 13-year-old daughter, sounds just as pleased as her husband about her physical attributes.

“I’m not an exhibitionist,” she said. “My body is the result of hard work. I want to show that having kids, a marriage and work are not excuses for a woman to stop taking care of herself.”

It was not the first time she had stripped off for the camera. She has posed for Russian Playboy and Penthouse magazines as well as for Helmut Newton, the late photographer famous for his provocative nudes. “I see no problem with showing off a beautiful naked body,” said Olga.

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Telecommunications billionaire Mr Thaksin and his wife are in effect stateless. They both face jail sentences if they return to Thailand – he over a conviction on charges of breaching conflict-of-interest laws and she for a tax evasion conviction. Mr Thaksin says the charges and convictions are politically motivated.

Britain, where the couple have spent most of their time since he lost his office in a military coup in 2006, recently revoked both their visas, citing their criminal convictions as the reason. Mr Thaksin’s location is not clear, although the divorce was finalised in the Thai consulate in Hong Kong last week.

The Nation, one of Thailand’s leading English language newspapers, suggested that the divorce was motivated by financial considerations because many of the couple’s assets are believed to be in Mrs Potjaman’s name. However, a spokesman for Mr Thaksin denied this.

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A failure could have repercussions for Merckle’s holdings, which span as many as 30 companies in the cement, machinery and pharmaceutical industries, said the people. The group of banks signed a so-called standstill agreement that blocks them from making claims on outstanding loans as they try to hammer out a rescue, according to one of the people.

“The banks would be better off to bail out the company than let it run into the ground,” said Stefan Mueller, managing partner at Proprietary Partners AG in Frankfurt. “But it’s difficult for banks to reach financing agreements in the current environment. A lot of people have lost money in the stock market, including on Volkswagen.”

The banks, which also include state-owned Landesbank Baden- Wuerttemberg and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, may agree on a bridge loan by early next week to avoid a potential collapse, the people said.

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If the Ecclestone marriage has broken down, it could produce one of the largest divorce settlements in history. Mr Ecclestone, a self-made man, is reputed to have accumulated £2.4bn from the television rights and other spin-offs from Formula One. But he has made over the bulk of his huge fortune to his wife, who is not domiciled in the UK for tax purposes. When he made £1.9bn from a bond issue in 1999, the money was put in off-shore trusts controlled by Slavica.

The couple married 24 years ago, and have always seemed an unlikely team. She is a Croatian-born former Armani model; he is the son of a North Sea trawler skipper, who left school to work at a gasworks at the age of 16. The age gap between them is 28 years. When they first met, at the 1982 Italian Grand Prix, two years before they married, he was 52 and she was 24. There is also a 10in gap in their heights, he being 5ft 4in, and she is 6ft 2in.

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The co-founder of Broadcom Corp., who has pleaded not guilty to federal criminal charges of drug distribution and securities fraud, wrote that he wanted out of the tech company that had made him a billionaire.

Although he has repeatedly denied drug use, his e-mail depicts a highly successful man whose forays into debauchery have cost him his family – and threatened the company he built.

“I deserve everything that is happening to me. I just wish I didn’t have other people who depend upon me and look to me to be their leader,” Nicholas wrote in the e-mail, which has been turned over to federal authorities but has never been published.

In the message, obtained by The Orange County Register from a former Broadcom employee with access to the former CEO’s e-mail, Nicholas details his drug use and frets about his stewardship of the company.

“The worst part is seeing the company falling apart because I am not fully functioning,” he writes. “However, I don’t care about Broadcom anymore, I just feel like a liar to the people I am recruiting into new positions.”

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Berkshire disclosed its investments in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, in which it reported holdings of stocks on U.S. exchanges as of Sept. 30.

The Omaha, Nebraska-based insurance and investment company said it owned 83.96 million shares in Houston-based Conoco, worth $6.15 billion, as of the end of September, equal to a 5.6 percent stake. That is up from 59.69 million shares as of June 30, and 17.51 million three months earlier.

Buffett had previously kept the June stake confidential. The SEC often lets Buffett, one of the world’s richest people and perhaps its most revered investor, delay disclosure of his investing activity so others cannot copy him.

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The final agenda for Thursday night’s meeting of the Greenwich Planning and Zoning Commission, available on the commission’s Web site, states that Mr. Cohen (pictured above, at left, with art collector Larry Gagosian) and his wife, Alexandra, are applying for a special permit to add another 1,145 square feet, give or take a few square inches, to their house on Crown Lane.

Here’s the agenda item in full:

Stephen A. and Alexandra M. Cohen; application PSP #3722 and SP #3723 for a preliminary site plan and special permit to add 1,144.89 sq. ft. to an existing 35,084.89 sq. ft. residence on site, in excess of 150,000 cubic feet in volume on a 13.911 acre property located at 30 Crown Lane in the RA-4 zone.

The meeting was scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday; it was not clear on Friday how the presentation went or when the planning board might make a decision. The planning board told DealBook that no one was immediately available to answer questions.

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On Friday he could be sentenced to up to 18 years in prison for defrauding investors and compounding his woes by trying to cheat at his federal trial.

Johnson was CEO of PurchasePro, a software company that relied heavily on a partnership with tech giant America Online which included secret side deals.

At his 2007 trial, Johnson also tried unsuccessfully to sneak in a fabricated e-mail as evidence he believed would exonerate him.

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His views run counter to those of investors such as hedge- fund manager William Ackman and executives including Jack Welch, the former chief executive officer of General Electric Co., who have said the automakers could solve some of their problems by restructuring in bankruptcy court. Others side with Ross.

Ross, dubbed the “King of Bankruptcy” by Fortune magazine in 1998, said a restructuring bid by one of the three top U.S. automakers would topple its peers and drive weakened suppliers out of business because the credit crunch dried up financing.

“If we were in a different overall economic environment, one of them going down wouldn’t necessarily kill” the industry, he said. A weakened economy and frozen debt markets make an automaker bankruptcy impossible, with a Chapter 11 filing for reorganization resulting in liquidation instead, Ross said.

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While the average hedge fund fell 9.4 percent this year through September, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc., Pershing Square profited from declines in the value of bond insurers. Ackman invested in AIG following the government bailout in September, then reversed course, according to the Nov. 3 letter from the money manager.

“We ultimately concluded the return on invested brain damage from this investment exceeded the probability-weighted opportunity for profit, and we decided to fold the tent,” Ackman wrote.

The firm’s Pershing Square LP fund returned 1.9 percent net of fees this year through Sept. 30, according to the letter. Pershing Square II LP returned 3.2 percent after fees in the same period.

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Lampert, a former AutoNation director who is also chairman of Sears Holdings Corp., bought 529,300 shares at an average price of $5.99 apiece on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to a regulatory filing.

Lampert-controlled entities already controlled about 40 percent of the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., company’s stock, and they now own more than 78 million shares, or about 44 percent of AutoNation, according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This week’s purchases were made on behalf of two Lampert-controlled entities, ESL Investors LLC and ESL Partners LP, both of Greenwich, Conn.

AutoNation shares rallied Thursday, closing up $1.32, or 22.2 percent, at $7.28. They have been slumping since mid-2007 and have ranged from $3.97 to $19.59 over the past year.

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Falcone, senior managing director of New York-based Harbinger Capital Partners, urged Congress to require more disclosure by hedge funds, which oversee $1.7 trillion of investments. Soros, founder of Soros Fund Management LLC, cautioned against “ill-considered” rules because this industry is reeling from market losses and client defections.

“We do not need greater regulation of hedge funds,” said Kenneth Griffin, founder of Citadel Investment Group LLC in Chicago. “We’ve not seen hedge funds as a focal point of the carnage.”

The hearing was called by committee Chairman Henry Waxman, whose panel doesn’t have jurisdiction over securities-industry legislation. Even so, his interest suggests the industry faces increased scrutiny and regulation next year after President- elect Barack Obama takes office.

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Billionaire hedge fund managers including George Soros of Soros Fund Management LLC in New York, Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group LLC in Chicago and Simons appeared before Congress today to defend their industry’s practices and suggest ways to repair the financial system after the world’s largest banks and insurers recorded writedowns and losses of $954 billion in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

“I do believe in the value of these new products, but the organizations rating them must owe their allegiance to buyers, not issuers,” Simons said

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He was giving evidence at an American Congressional hearing which is probing the hedge fund industry to see if it is a threat to the global financial system.

Hedge funds use a range of complex strategies to invest sums for wealthy individuals and pension funds.

Soros was among a group of five hedge fund managers to appear at the hearing examining hedge funds’ huge investments and the effect they have had on the global financial system.

He said: ‘The bubble has now burst and hedge funds will be decimated. ‘It has to be recognised that hedge funds were an integral part of the bubble.’

Soros has long held controversial views on the way the markets are regulated.
He was appearing at Washington’s House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government.

The committee’s powerful chairman Henry Waxman called Soros, John Paulson, Philip Falcone, James Simons and Kenneth Griffin to testify because they

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There are 27 Indians with a net worth of $1 billion or more, compared with 54 last year. The key Sensitive index declined 53 percent this year and is set for its worst annual performance on record. At the same time, there are 456 million Indians who live on less than $1.25 a day, according to the World Bank.

“Indians who felt the heat of the meltdown have not exactly become paupers,” said Anup Kumar Sinha, professor at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, in Kolkata. “They will probably realize anew the importance of the real economy and reconcile to the vagaries of the financial markets.”

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The singer filed a grant deed on the ranch Monday that makes the new owner an entity called the Sycamore Valley Ranch Co. LLC, Tom Pearson of the Santa Barbara County clerk-recorder’s office said Wednesday.

Sycamore Valley Ranch Co. is a joint venture between Jackson and an affiliate of Colony Capital LLC, according to a person with knowledge of the transaction who was not authorized to speak on the record and requested anonymity.

The person could not say what would become of the 2,500-acre property in the bucolic, oak-studded hills of Santa Barbara County’s wine country, 120 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

A call to an attorney for Jackson, L. Londell McMillan, was not immediately returned Wednesday.

Jackson had gone into default on the $24.5 million he owes on the property and had faced foreclosure before Colony Capital bailed him out earlier this year by purchasing his loan.

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Even so, it’s too early to count the 75-year-old entrepreneur out, long-time associates say.

“If the world came to an end, there would be cockroaches and Sheldon,” said David Kaminer, 64, a former vice president at an Adelson operation that ran the Comdex computer trade show in Las Vegas. “And Sheldon would immediately be smart enough to open a pest-control company.”

Adelson, 75, a former bagel salesman who said in 2006 he would end up richer than Bill Gates, now faces dissension within the ranks of his senior managers, according to a regulatory filing that disclosed the formation of a committee to “resolve disagreements.” As the credit crunch and economic decline squeeze gambling’s growth, he risks the loss of some of his trophy properties, said John Staszak, an analyst with Argus Research Corp. in New York.

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Broad snagged Ed Ruscha’s 1969 mustard-hued “Desire” for $2.4 million, 40 percent under the $4 million low estimate.

The 43 lots that sold in the 63-lot auction totaled $125.1 million, far below the presale low estimate of $202.4 million. Twenty lots, or 32 percent, failed to sell, including several tagged with hefty estimates guaranteed by the auction house.

It was the lowest selling rate for a multiple-owner evening sale of contemporary art at Sotheby’s since November 1994. Sotheby’s comparable auction in May totaled $362 million, almost three times last night’s tally.

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http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9498

The hedge fund has also filed a number of Schedule 13D forms with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell major holdings Tontine has in firms such as Exide Technologies 

,Broadwind Energy

and Westmoreland Coal

.

The multi-billion dollar Greenwich, Conn.-based hedge fund, which is headed by Jeffrey Gendell, had posted average annual returns since 1997 of 38 percent.Despite Gendell’s track record for strong performance, this year bas been a dififerent story for Tontine. Tontine Capital is down 77.8 percent while Tontine Financial is down 83.3 percent for the year.

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Now oil prices are at a 20-month low, falling to $59.33 a barrel on Tuesday, and gasoline prices have plummeted to below $2 a gallon in many parts of the country.

“I think I’ve done a pretty good job,” he said, generating a laugh at the annual Edison Electric Institute convention of the nation’s power executives.

Pickens acknowledged later at a news conference that there is more than one factor for the collapse of oil prices, including the slowing economy that many analysts say has gone into a recession. Now with oil prices down, Pickens has said he has reduced what he planned to spend on his campaign — trimming spending to $40 million to $50 million from his initial plan of about $60 million.

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Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin last week asked Rosteknadzor, Russia’s industrial safety watchdog, to reopen its investigation into the cause of the flood and the damage done. Prices for potash, a mineral used to protect crops from disease and dry soil, have risen more than fivefold since the October 2006 flood at Uralkali’s Mine 1, leading companies such as state- run arms trader OAO Rosoboronexport to enter the industry.

Uralkali dropped 33 percent to $11.50 in London at 9:57 a.m. local time, heading for the biggest decline in a month. Uralkali has lost 70 percent this year.

The 2006 investigation concluded that the flooding was a result of “extraordinary and unavoidable events,” Uralkali said Nov. 7. The flood was the second for the company in 20 years, after one in 1986 that closed Mine 3. All of Uralkali’s mining units are near the town of Berezniki.

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