Four to finish his opening statement. Millionaire Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza is suing his eldest son over a fortune worth an estimated $2.7 billion. 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 on for a year and four months and has cost an estimated $90 million in legal fees, had been stopped for legal clarifications. The case stopped over the summer and was due to resume in November, but once again there were legal delays. It is expected to take a week or so to finish, before Alan Boyle QC, another leading legal light, puts his case for Heini Jr, or Georg. But during this long respite all has not been quiet on millionaire row. The colourful family has been bickering in the press over Heini, the 80-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 four other children have stayed out of the limelight during the trial, but last year daughter Francesca, in a interview in The Sunday Times, sided with her brother Georg 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. Francesca 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 hit back in the world's best selling magazine, the Spanish `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 stepmother makes me laugh...anyway as far as I know, Francesca has been no `Cinderella'.'' The Baroness married the baron in 1985. 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. PHOTO Back into battle: Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza pictured with his fifth wife Carmen. After months of delay the world's spotlight is once again on Bermuda's courts as one of the most widely followed civil cases in the Island's history gets under way. Mairi Mallon reports BUSINESS BUC