The Last Onassis Inherits Billions - and the Legacy of a Problem Family

Athina Roussel will start her 18th birthday this morning by walking into a Swiss accountant's office, signing some papers, and walking out again. She will then be £1.7bn better off, and rather richer than the Queen.

Actually, only the accountant knows how much she will be getting. Other estimates have included £2.5bn, and €1.56bn, and if you believe her family - who have every interest in playing it down - the sum is a piddling $800m. It is, in any event, a lot of money.

But Ms Roussel will be coming into rather more than the contents of 217 bank accounts, companies in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Japan and Iran, a Latin American airline, a tower on Fifth Avenue, a hotel in Monte Carlo, the Greek island of Skorpios, luxury homes in Paris, Athens, London, New York and Switzerland and an extraordinary collection of paintings, sculptures and jewellery.

The granddaughter and last direct descendant of the late Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, she will also inherit a family history that is not of the happiest: her mother Christina, whose money Athina comes into today, died - apparently from an overdose of slimming pills - in a Buenos Aires bathtub in 1988, when Athina was three.

Christina, who had fought eating disorders, drug abuse and depression most of her adult life, had at that stage just divorced Athina's father, the French playboy Thierry Roussel, the last of her four husbands.

Athina's brother, Alexander, who had been groomed to take over the Onassis empire, died in 1973 at the age of 25 in a freak plane accident. Her larger-than-life grandfather, who in 1969 had ended an affair with the opera diva Maria Callas to marry Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the assassinated US president, died broken-hearted in 1975.

So it should come as no big surprise that Athina, in a rare interview, with the Italian magazine Oggi in 1998, declared that she wanted to forget the name Onassis. "It is the cause of all the problems."

But Ms Roussel, who has lived with her father and his Swedish wife since her mother's death, also inherits a longer-term problem. The remainder of her grandfather's immense fortune is tied up in the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, over which Athina is supposed, under Aristotle's will, to take control in three years' time.

That succession appears in doubt since over the past decade, Mr Roussel - once dubbed the "most successful gigolo in the world" for capturing and then divorcing Mrs Onassis - and the four men who previously co-administered her estate, known as the greybeards, have been involved in some 65 court cases. The greybeards have accused Mr Roussel of deliberately isolating Athina from her Greek heritage and being a "bad father".

Stelios Papadimitriou, who heads the Onassis Foundation, has frequently described Mr Roussel as an "atrocious businessman". In response, Mr Roussel has accused the greybeards of financial mismanagement, defamation and even kidnapping, once alleging the foundation's lifetime board members had paid Israeli secret agents to abduct Athina.

Amazingly, the young heiress appears to have survived her trial by Onassis unscathed. The stabilising influence appears to have come from her Swedish stepmother, Gaby, who has brought up her family in relative normality in a nondescript five-bedroom chalet. Athina has shunned the limelight, and devotes most of her time to show-jumping, a sport in which she has hopes of competing for Greece in the 2004 Athens Olympics.

For although her Greek is poor and she clearly knows precious little about her birthplace, the last Onassis is an icon in Greece. Increasingly, she is being put on a par with Princess Diana in the early days of her marriage to Charles. The Greek media has remained uncharacteristically protective of Athina, despite the often aggressive coverage of her father, and most Greeks, according to one poll, believe she will play "the most influential role" in their country's public life in the next decade.

"There's no question that she's very aware of the Onassis legacy and likes the fact that Greeks see her as an icon," said Alexis Matheakis, the author of the only inside account of the heiress, Athina in the Eye of the Storm. "But she also feels very negative about the nasty comments that have come from the [former] Greek trustees [of her fortune], and the way certain Greek judges have treated her father."

According to Mr Matheakis, Athina is a "serious and very mature" young lady whose head will not be turned by her fortune: she plans to continue living in Switzerland and attending riding school in Brussels.

But there was an eerie echo of her mother's stormy emotional life when she was criticised over her relationship with the Brazilian Olympic show jumper Alvaro de Miranda Neto, a bronze medallist in the 2000 Sydney games. Sibele Dorsa, 29, the show-jumper's ex-wife and mother of their young daughter, Viviane, said he had simply "exchanged me for Athina's money".

"She can buy him horses and I can't. He always told me he found her fat and ugly."

In the end, determined as she may be to live according to what Mr Matheakis calls "ordinary little day-to-day values not always found in wealthy kids in Greece", Ms Roussel may find it hard not to live up to the family name she professes to dislike so much: it is hard to fight against £1.7bn.

The dynasty

Aristotle Onassis

Athina's grandfather, who arrived on the docks of Buenos Aires with just $60 in his pocket and went on to build up an a fleet of tankers, the basis of his immense fortune. He died of cancer in 1975.

Tina (Athina) Livanos

Daughter of a fellow Greek shipping magnate. Married Aristotle, but the marriage ended when Tina discovered her husband having sex in the saloon of the yacht that bore her name with the opera singer Maria Callas.

She eventually married her former husband's arch-rival, Stavros Niarchos, and committed suicide in 1974.

Mother of Christina and Alexander

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

In 1968 Aristotle married the former First Lady. She died of cancer on May 19 1994, at the age of 64.

Alexander

Died in 1973 aged 25 in a plane crash. Was hoping to marry British model Fiona Campbell-Walter (ex-wife of Baron 'Heini' Thyssen).

Christina

After her parents' divorce she barely saw her father. She was married four times, the first at the age of 20 to a 48-year-old millionaire estate agent; it lasted less than a year. She married Roussel in 1984.

Thierry Roussel

Father of Athina. French playboy. Christina was said to have been so keen to marry him that she paid him $30m to compensate him for moving to Switzerland. It lasted three years.

Athina

Was three when her mother Christina, 37, was found dead in the bath. It was believed that she had suffered a heart attack due to the overuse of slimming pills.