Swarovski heiress socialite is ‘devastated’ after her husband is jailed for eight years

A socialite and heiress to the Swarovski jewellery company is said to be ‘devastated’ after her husband was jailed for eight years in Austria’s biggest corruption trial since World War II.

Austrian Fiona Swarovski seemed to have it all, but her privileged life has suddenly lost its sparkle with the jailing of her flamboyant husband Karl-Heinz Grasser.

The country’s ex-finance minister Grasser was found guilty of taking bribes and sentenced to eight years in prison on Friday.

The Vienna criminal court ruled that Grasser, 51, was part of a gang that received bribes for helping the winning bidder in a £868 million (961m euro) sale of state-owned apartments in 2004.

Fiona, 55, who married Grasser in 2005, is said to be ‘devastated’ at the verdict.

The three-year trial is the latest trauma to hit the Swarovski clan.

The firm, founded 125 years ago, recently announced it was laying off 6,000 employees and closing 3,000 boutiques.

Due to a vast restructuring plan and the pandemic, annual sales of its core crystal business are predicted to plummet by more than 33 per cent to 2 billion euros.

The three-year trial scrutinised the financial affairs of Austria’s most famous couple.

Fiona’s elderly mother Marina Giori-Lhota, who has the second-largest stake in Swarovski, was also dragged into the case concerning mystery payments totalling 500,000 euros.

Known in the Austrian media as the infamous ‘Schwiegermuttergeld’, or ‘mother-in-law payment’, it was alleged that Marina gave Grasser the sum to then launder.

She denied this and her daughter Fiona claimed that her husband often covered her shopping expenses and she reimbursed him in cash.

Fiona, who has four children from four different marriages, and her husband are a colourful couple. In 2006 they were afforded round-the-clock protection by elite police commandos following a plot to kidnap Fiona in return for a ransom.

Debonair Grasser became Austria’s youngest-ever finance minister in 2000. He was a political star touted as a possible future chancellor.

In 2006, he ran for the People’s Party but after losing the election he went into business.

The investigation into Grasser began in 2009 as an offshoot of an unrelated criminal probe into the near-collapse of Immofinanz AG, the winning bidder in the apartment auction.

Grasser informed his business partner of the minimum amount necessary for a sale, allowing the buyer to slightly outbid the competition and secure the purchase.

The consortium valued their new properties at double that price just three years later.

The firm paid £8.66 million to Grasser’s co-defendant who took part of the sum and split the rest between three secret accounts in Liechtenstein.

Judge Marion Hohenecker accepted the prosecutors claim that Grasser was the beneficiary of one of the accounts.

She said: ‘The court is convinced that Karl-Heinz Grasser revealed the upper limit of the rival bid. [The winning bidder’s success] was achieved through bribery and was only possible because of the intentional abuse of authority.’

The trial heard from 150 witnesses.

Grasser’s lawyer said his client will appeal the decision.