The last Onassis

When Athina Onassis Roussel, the only grandchild of Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, turns 18 on 29 January, she will inherit her late mother Christina's entire fortune, estimated at anything between £1.6 billion and £4 billion. She will instantly become one of the richest and most wanted women in the world. We're not talking pearl necklaces or a new (armour-plated) Mini as 18th-birthday presents. Her wealth will include luxurious villas and homes in Switzerland, New York, London and on the Avenue Foch in Paris, the Metropole Hotel in Monte Carlo, the Olympic Tower in New York, tens of millions stashed away in gold bullion, tens of millions more in 217 banks around the world, an airline in South America, and a spectacular art and jewellery collection. Oh, and two of her very own Greek islands.

Not that Athina ever showed any intention of visiting either of them. Ever since her 37-year-old mother died mysteriously (officially of a heart attack, but there are persistent rumours that it was suicide) in a Buenos Aires bathtub in 1988, when Athina was just three, her French playboy father, Thierry Roussel, Christina's fourth husband, has deliberately turned his daughter against her Greek background and heritage. Several years ago, Athina was reported as saying that she has an 'abhorrence for anything Greek'.

Although she speaks French, Swiss German and English, she hardly knows a word of her mother tongue, despite a provision of the $8-million-a-year allowance from her family trust paid out to her father and her Swedish-translatorturnedstepmother Gaby Landhage - her mother's former rival - for her 'maintenance' being that she was required to take Greek classes. She never has. On her 13th birthday, her father allowed her to say a few carefully drafted words to an Italian magazine: 'I want to forget the name Onassis. It's the cause of all the problem.'

The reason for all this bitterness has much to do with the battle her father has long waged against the elderly 'Gang of Four' trustees of the Onassis Foundation as to who should control Athina's billions. The trustees, led by Stelio Papadimitriou, personal lawyer to both Christina and Aristotle Onassis, were entrusted to look after her vast wealth until Athina was 18. Athina's coming of age should theoretically bring to an end the intense wrangling, but the reality is that they are now having the strongest reservations about handing over the Onassis legacy to a young woman whose twice-bankrupt father they have always suspected of being an unscrupulous fortune hunter.

Roussel married Christina in Paris in 1984, but their marriage lasted for just three years. So desperate was Christina to get Roussel back, she agreed to pay for his Swedish mistress to come on holiday with them.

On the other hand, the trustees have been accused by Roussel of squandering Athina's assets, siphoning off their own eye-watering legal fees - they have put in an 'overtime' bill of over £2 million for running her estate - and brazen nepotism in appointing their own Greek family members to the Onassis Foundation board.

The coming of age of the last Onassis was never going to be a low-profile event. 'Now that she is about to turn 18, she understands that she will be unable to keep hiding from the press and will have to fight her own battles,' says a wealthy Greek society member in London who knew her mother. 'She is naturally shy and has been very closely guarded all her life by bodyguards, so the freedom that comes with her adulthood will be at a price. It is something that will be very new and quite unfamiliar to her. And she knows all the world - and the Greeks in particular - will be watching her every move.'

In Greece she is feted as a pop-star-like icon. Indeed, the build-up to her 18th birthday has seen a near-religious fever of interest in her by the Greek press.

'With the Olympics coming up, Greece is desperate for some role models and Athina is like the Princess Diana of the country,' says an old Greek society member. The 2004 Olympics are of great importance to the Greeks and Athina herself - it is her dream to represent her country in its equestrian team.

Athina has always been horse mad (one of her favourite films is International Velvet) and spends four hours a day on horseback. She has been invited to join Greece's exclusive Atticus riding club. She already has her own stables in the compound of her well-guarded five-bedroom family home in the Swiss village of Lussy-sur-Morges, in the mountains near Lake Geneva, where she lives with Roussel and Landhage (who had two children with Roussel while he was still married to Christina).

Ever since being invited for Olympic trials, a familiar local sight has been Athina riding her horse Erco, wearing her Prada sunglasses and surrounded by bodyguards on mountain bikes. While trekking, she listens to pop music - she used to like the Spice Girls and Britney Spears but now prefers Madonna - on a Walkman. She is also becoming increasingly aware of her appearance, recently losing a reputed 40lbs.

Athina now has her first boyfriend, a predictably dashing 29-year-old Brazilian showjumper called Alvaro Alfonso de Miranda Neto, who won a bronze medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. He and Athina have been frequently seen together at the stables, near Brussels, of the international showjumping trainer and rider Nelson Pessoa, who introduced them. They might even compete against each other in the Olympics. Rumour has it that Athina plans to provide him with a £250,000 horse.

The difficulty, however, is that the raffish Alvaro also comes with a very angry estranged wife, 28-year-old actress and model Sibele - and a two-year-old daughter, Viviane - whom he conveniently ditched for Athina last year.

'He exchanged me for Athina's money,' Sibele has said. 'He's virtually penniless and his allconsuming passion is for expensive horses. She can buy him horses and I can't.'

Athina and Alvaro met last February and are now so close that they will be spending her 18th birthday together on Skorpios, one of her Greek islands. Speaking to a Brazilian newspaper, de Miranda said recently of his soon-to-be billionairess girlfriend: 'She is simple, gentle, sweet and doesn't make a distinction between people, giving the same treatment to a member of her family as she does to someone who takes care of her horses.' Indeed, she recently invited 40 orphans to a party in her home. And Athina expressed her admiration for de Miranda's disinterest in money to her friends.

Certainly her father, for all his character faults, seems to have done a better job than her tycoon grandfather in grounding his children. When her mother was alive, Athina was spoiled to the point of indecency. She was given dolls dressed in Dior couture, had her very own zoo and when she started singing 'Baa Baa Black Sheep', her mother gave her a flock of real fluffy sheep.

Starved of love by her own father, Christina's tragedy was that she seemed to think that her money could buy her love. Instead, it only brought her misery and four huge divorce settlements. Christina came to feel that she couldn't trust anybody unless she was paying them. She ended up hiring ex-lovers for £1,000 a day just to keep her company. Whereas her mother's 'poor little rich girl' teenage years were spent shuttling from country palace to yacht to luxury villa, Athina's own upbringing has been remarkably stable.

Instead of attending one of the exclusive Swiss finishing schools for the young jet set, Athina was sent to a local state school where she made friends with the children of the local hairdresser and fared considerably better academically than her mother. And while Aristotle showered his daughter with money in lieu of love, Athina, by contrast, has been brought up on a strict pocketmoney allowance of about £100 per week. So far this policy seems to have worked. In fact, within the Hellenocracy there are serious doubts about whether Athina actually wants to take on her grandfather's doom-laden legacy at all.

Although the rumours that she is preparing to give her fortune away are 'groundless', says a source close to the legal team that advises Athina, what is true is that she will not use the Onassis surname.

This, of course, has been her father's plan all along. The comparatively relaxed way (if you can ever call having armed ex-SAS bodyguards following you around the clock 'relaxed') Athina has been brought up has meant that she has been untarnished by the mercenary politics of the Greek shipping families, which encourage intermarriage within the dynasties to protect family assets.

Whatever Greek identification Athina does have is far more likely to come from her Livanos rather than her Onassis family blood line. She was named after her matriarchal aristocratic grandmother Tina Livanos, the sister of Eugenie Livanos who married the shipping billionaire Stavros Niarchos.

The Livanos family are feted like royalty in Greece, while Aristotle Onassis was always socially insecure about being perceived as a parvenu tanker pirate 'islander' who started up his shipping empire with just $60. Tina's own marriage to Aristotle ended soon after she saw her priapic tycoon husband having sex with opera singer Maria Callas on board his yacht on a summer cruise in 1959.

Should things with Athina's new Brazilian boyfriend falter, it is not impossible to imagine her marrying an Englishman. After all, she has a beautiful house in London and her late mother's brother Alexander was hoping to marry British Fifties model Fiona Campbell-Walter (ex-wife of Baron 'Heini' Thyssen) before he was tragically killed in 1973. Many of her own Livanos clan already live in Britain, where they enjoy the 'non dom' tax status that has made London a social haven for Greek shipping families.

When Christina died, her uncle George Livanos offered to bring up Athina himself in Britain. After Tina Livanos was divorced from Aristotle Onassis, she ended up marrying Sunny Blandford, the future Duke of Marlborough (although they were divorced before she became his duchess of Blenheim). As a result, Christina, sent off to Heathfield, grew up partly in England with the hedonist Jamie Blandford as her stepbrother (they fell out during his worst days of drug and alcohol excess).

Athina's father has gone out of his way to ensure that his daughter has a much more cosmopolitan upbringing than her mother did.

Although Athina does have the Greek ' oldguard' establishment Onassis Foundation to deal with, she has been fortunate not to have had to battle against any powerful Greek grandmother matriarch figures in her life, who often rule Greek families.

One reason Athina's trustees in Athens remain so furious with Roussel is that he has so far successfully cut her off from the possibility of marrying one of their own, or their Greek dynastic kind.

As a Greek society source intimate with Athina's background said: 'It is always the elder women in Greek families who have all the power and decide who should marry whom.

Being brought up in Switzerland means that she will not feel pressurised to marry another Greek. In wealthy Greek families, when you marry, love comes far down on the agenda. It is only status and money that matter. That is what Onassis himself was always seeking. He just wanted to have Jackie Onassis because she was the ultimate trophy wife. He was really in love with Callas, but Callas didn't fulfil the right dynastic requirement. Despite being the world's most famous opera singer, the old Greek families viewed her as a peasant.'

Although undoubtedly the members of the Onassis Foundation would prefer
Athina in Greece so they could have greater control over her personal life and her fortune, the reason the family lawyer Papadimitriou gave for trying to prevent Roussel from bringing up Athina in Switzerland is that he received a letter from Christina a few months before her death which said: 'If anything happens to me, Roussel will be the child's guardian. I don't want him. Keep him out of it.'

This, combined with Roussel's serial philandering, was enough to have Papadimitriou and his fellow trustees smear Athina's father's name as a profligate gold-digger and professional extortionist. The foundation even went so far as to hire a team of ex-Israeli secret service agents to follow him, with Roussel claiming that they were planning on kidnapping Athina in order to take her back to Greece.

But the tactic appears to have backfired badly. Athina has now come out in support of her father, with whom she seems to be close, saying that she only wishes that the Onassis Foundation would stop 'attacking' her. The foundation, meanwhile, has gone on the defensive saying that Roussel uses Athina as his 'weapon'. 'It hurts us that she probably thinks we are the evil ones,' says Papadimitriou.

If Athina does take over as president of the foundation (estimated at worth a further £600 million) on her 21st birthday and assume total control of the Onassis fortune, it is likely that she may decide - at her father's prompting, no doubt - to have a clear-out of the current lackeys who have been appointed by Papadimitriou to the board. Understandably, Papadimitriou is furious at this possibility. 'Her father is robbing her of her Greek identity,' he says. 'How can she possibly assume the reins of the legacy?'

But this is not a choice that either Athina, or any of the vultures who have been circling her since her mother's death, can make. Because, by virtue of the name that she so reviles, Athina Onassis is the legacy.