💃🏻 🎭 💸 Gina Lollobrigida – the Italian film star once called “the world’s most beautiful woman” – has hired a mafia-busting former magistrate to challenge a court ruling that she is no longer fit to manage her millions. The 94-year-old actress is fighting a legal battle with her son, Milko Skofic, who says her assistant Andrea Piazzolla “brainwashed” her and stole assets worth €5m.
Now on trial for fraud, Piazzolla has been accused of buying a Ferrari with Lollobrigida’s money, then selling it and handing the proceeds to his parents. He denies all charges. “No one will steal my liberty,” says Lollobrigida, who starred alongside Humphrey Bogart and Sean Connery in the 1950s and 1960s. “They should leave me to die in peace.”
A roaring second-hand trade
⌚ 🇨🇳 💰 Second-hand Rolexes are selling for three times their original price because of a surge in demand from China’s booming middle class. The shortage of available timepieces has led to waiting lists of several years for popular models: some dealers in Germany are asking for £88,000 for the green-faced gold Cosmograph Daytona – £60,000 more than the retail price through official Rolex distributors.
Tim Stracke, who runs the online watch marketplace Chrono24, says most of the Rolexes listed on his website sell out within hours. “Normally you buy a new watch and you lose 20% to 30% of its value right when you walk out of the shop,” he told the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “But with Rolex it’s exactly the opposite these days. If you obtain a new Rolex, its value immediately goes up by 30% to 50%.”
What’s in a name?
👾 🏟️ 📈 The online cryptocurrency marketplace Crypto.com has forked out $700m to change the name of the Staples Center – home of the LA Lakers basketball team – to Crypto.com Arena for the next 20 years. It’s already looking like a good bet: the resulting PR has led to a $9bn jump in the firm’s market capitalisation, meaning the deal has paid for itself almost 13 times over.
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