Glock wife's alimony claim thrown out by Austrian court
Ex-wife loses bid for stake in €2.15b company after gunmaker marries woman 51 years his junior.
He is the 84-year-old Austrian billionaire who made his fortune by creating the eponymous pistol. She is his former wife of 49 years, who divorced him when he took up with a woman 51 years his junior. The case has riveted Austria for weeks.
Gaston Glock, a former radiator engineer, made his fortune after creating the plastic pistol that became Nato standard issue in the early 1980s.
The now legendary pistol was his first attempt at producing a weapon and it is still used by more than half of all US police departments.
In happier days, Helga Glock, 71, agreed to pass her 15 per cent share of a firm now valued at around €2.15 billion (HK$228.13 billion) to a trust for the family, including their three children.
But in 2011, just a few months after his divorce from Helga, Gaston married Kathrin Tschikof.
He also fired Helga and their three children from their jobs and cancelled their stake in the company that was held in trust.
As part of her bid to claw back the stake, Helga included testimony detailing information about the break up of the marriage. She said it had effectively ended in 2008 after Glock had a stroke, and had then become close to Tschikof.
In her testimony, Helga described how Tschikof prevented the family from seeing Glock, saying: "She totally denied me and other family members any access to him, warning us that such contact would threaten another stroke or possibly cause death."
Glock's lawyer Maximilian Eiselsberg had filed a claim that rejected the allegation and said his client's stroke was not the point when the marriage ended, arguing instead that it effectively ended in 1988 when he moved into a new home and lived separately from Helga.
Earlier this year, Helga had more success in the courts after a ruling in Vienna said she may receive an allowance based on her husband's income, despite her former husband's lawyers arguing that her existing income was enough to cover her living costs.
In August, the court agreed with her saying that alimony had to be decided the same way for high incomes as it does for lower incomes.
The scandal is not the first to involve Glock. Gaston Glock successfully prosecuted his financial adviser Charles Ewert for hiring a hitman to kill him in 1999.
Ewert was sentenced to 20 years in jail with the hitman Jacques Pecheur receiving a 17-year sentence.
* This article was amended on March 17, 2022. An earlier version said Gaston Glock married Kathrin Tschikof, a "nurse who cared for him after he had suffered a stroke". In February 2022, a representative for Kathrin Glock (formerly Tschikof) said she met Mr Glock in 2004 and has never worked as a nurse.
