After a spell in Portugal, the family moved to Switzerland where they remained for the rest of their nearly six decades of exile.Victor Emmanuel made his priorities plain enough when he chose as his wife a Swiss skiing champion of modest origins but the heir of a large biscuit manufacturing fortune. The family’s real estate alone is said to be worth €40m.Victor Emmanuel went into exile with his father, King Umberto I, who sat on the throne for less than a month when he was nine years old. Today the family is worth at least €70m (£48m), though a recent article in a business magazine claimed the true figure held in banks and investments in Switzerland and the United States could be as much as €450m. In Italy condemnation often comes before charges are laid; and punishment, too, in the form of public humiliation.Yet the transcripts of the prosecutor’s wiretaps of the prince and his associates that have been filling Italy’s daily papers appear to provide startling evidence of guilt. They give a vivid impression of a man, already immensely wealthy but consumed with greed, and using his name and influence to grub money from seedy affairs of every sort, from casinos and video-game slot machines in tax havens to prostitution, and trying to use his influence with the authorities, including the tax police, to insulate himself from attack.This is the squalid endgame of a dynasty that originated more than 1,000 years ago on what is now the Italian-French border and that became, despite having roots and a culture that were scarcely Italian, the nation’s royal rulers. Only then, and not necessarily even then, will he be charged and brought to trial, a trial which, like nearly all Italian trials, is likely to drag on and on for years: every year the European Court of Human Rights tries to prod Italy into doing something about its painfully tardy legal system. He believes the former prince is the leader of a criminal gang involved with illegal gambling and prostitution and more.And late last Friday Mr Savoy was seized, driven “bent double” in the police Fiat Tipo “as if squashed into a suitcase – it was a nightmarish journey,” he complained, from his home in Rome to Mr Woodcock’s headquarters in Potenza.In a few days or weeks Mr Savoy will walk out of Potenza jail a free man, once the investigators have squeezed him dry.

He is not yet on trial.But Henry John Woodcock, the 39-year-old half-British state prosecutor of Potenza, has been listening in to his telephone conversations and those of his associates for a long time, and believes that there are serious charges to be answered. And to abstain from alcohol for a spell is a good thing, too…” It is possible that he was being deeply ironical.Vittorio Emanuele Alberto Carlo Teodoro Umberto Bonifacio Amadeo Damiano Bernardo Gennaro Maria of Savoy, 69, known to Italian monarchists as Vittorio Emanuel IV and to other Italians as plain Mr Savoy, has not been charged with anything. He has complained bitterly about having the belt for his trousers confiscated, but by the time Prosecutor Woodcock came to question him on Tuesday he had re-assembled his damaged dignity.”Everything here is marvellous,” he warbled to Mr Woodcock, “the Italian cooking is excellent, also this mineral water they provide, which I find diuretic. Sarkozy is Interior Minister and number two in the French government, and the likely centre-right candidate for the presidency Last May he admitted there were “problems” in his marriage. Mme Sarkozy later left to live in New York with another man, but she has since returned and attended the Roland Garros French Open tennis championships with her husband.. Even for a nation that renounced its monarchy by popular vote 60 years ago,there is a curious frisson involved in seeing the erstwhile heir to the throne locked up in jail. And when the man doing the locking-up is a firebrand prosecutor named Woodcock who was born in Somerset, there is more than a whiff of Cromwell about it.

“Prince” Victor Emmanuel – he uses the title even though they were abolished when Italy became a republic, and was recently addressed as “your highness” on television by one notorious brown nose – has been held in the jail of the city of Potenza, in Italy’s deep south, for the best part of a week.
Since his arrest last Friday he has shared a cell four metres square with Gian Nicolino Narducci, a long-time aide who is also under investigation: he has taken the top bunk, as befits a “highness”, though on the first night he fell out of it and sustained bruises. Genestar has presided over a series of “people” scoops – including the revelation last July of the illegitimate son of Prince Albert of Monaco. He has also increased the magazine’s circulation in a difficult French publishing market.Asked last November if changes were planned at Paris Match, M Lagard? said: “There are people you fire, absolutely That’s life … It’s not necessarily cruel because in getting rid of one one journalist, you create another one.” Paris Match journalists were said to be ready to strike to save M Genestar’s job.M.