The epic battle for the Thyssen family billion dollar fortune has moved from the court room in Bermuda to centre stage in the European press.

Millionaire Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza is suing his eldest son over a fortune worth an estimated $2.7 billion in the Supreme Court in Bermuda.

The Baron signed over the family business (and fortune) to a continuity trust created in 1983, which immediately made his son Georg, the principal beneficiary.

The father is claiming the trust and his son owe him $232 million in arrears with inflation and loss of value and wants to wrest back control of the empire.

But the trial, which has been going for more than a year and has costs an estimated $70 million in legal fees, has been stopped for legal clarifications and will not resume until some time in November.

However, all has not been quiet on millionaire row. The colourful family has been bickering in the press over Heini, the 79-year-old baron, who has failing health.

Gossip columnists in Europe, where the Baron and his wife Carmen (Tita) Cervera regularly appear in glossy magazines, have long said the Baron's fifth wife is behind the feud and she has been labelled many times as the "evil stepmother'' coming between a loving son and father.

His other four children have stayed out of the limelight during the trial, but two weeks ago Francesca, one of Heini's five children, in a interview in The Sunday Times sided with her brother Georg, also known as Heini Jr., for the first time in public.

The Baron, during the protracted court case, has through his team of crack lawyers claimed that he is also acting to protect the interests of his other children and wants to spread the wealth more evenly among them.

But his daughter Francesca, who in the 1980s had her 15 seconds of fame when she turned up at a celebrity bash wearing a Versace dress and nothing else, thinks differently.

The Archduchess, who is married to the Archduke Charles of Hapsburg, claims the Baron's present wife has meddled with his mind to make sure she gets more money from the aging baron.

She is quoted as saying: "The matter makes me uneasy. My father has suffered a heart attack and is in a very vulnerable state.'' Francesca added that it is "the evil stepmother syndrome who has destroyed an untold number of families. My father's latest wife is not very excited right now about respecting previously settled family arrangements.'' But the latest Baroness has hit back in the world's best selling magazine, the Spanish language `Hola!'.

"Of all his five wives, I am the one who has looked after him best,'' she told Hola! The magazine, which has featured the baroness at regular intervals during her life, said the Baroness did not want to speak on the matter, but pushed by the glossy magazine welcomed them into her home in Mas Manas in the Costa Brava in Spain where she lives with the Baron.

She said she does not consider herself a stepmother. She said: "It is quite clear, Francesca already has a mother, Fiona Campbell, my husband's third wife. And then there is the fact that she has never lived with us. All that about the evil step mother makes me laugh...anyway as far as I know, Francesca has been no `Cinderella'.'' The war of words carries on for ten pages, with pictures of the Baroness, who married the baron in 1985, and her husband, who is pictured for the first time in a year out of his wheelchair, but with his arm in a silk sling.

The Baroness claims that all she asks is that the children visit their father once in a while.

"The haven't called him in over a year. Not on his birthday, not at Christmas... And that would no doubt have quite an impact on any father,'' she told the magazine.

The article says that the Baroness states that Francesca cannot know much about her father's health if she thinks he had a heart attack.

"They operated on an aneurysm my husband had in Paris. It was a very serious operation. And there I was, day and night, by his side. It was my duty. Heini says that, out of his five wives, I am, without a doubt, the one that cares for him the most and looks after him.'' The happy couple: Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and his wife Carmen (Tita) Cervera, as pictured in the Spanish language magazine Hola!