Gucci lawsuit has echoes of family's warring past

Elisabetta Gucci has reportedly received a lawsuit from the luxury group founded by her great grandfather Guccio Gucci over her plans to launch a hotel chain in her name.

The Bloomberg news service is reporting that Gucci Group, owned by the Pinault family-controlled PPR Group since 2004, has filed a lawsuit in Italy against Elisabetta and her partners in order to protect its rights.

Lorens Ziller, managing director of Elisabetta's EG Hotels company, told Bloomberg: "[Elisabetta] cannot cancel her name or her background. If she has a famous name or a famous background, that's not her fault and we are not trying to use it as much."

For its part, Gucci Group, which is now run by non-family management, said it wanted to make clear that it has "no relationship to Elisabetta Gucci Hotels and that it is not involved in any project whatsoever with Elisabetta Gucci Hotels."

The case has grim echoes of the infighting that led to the break-up of the family and the business in the 1990s. Elisabetta's father Paolo Gucci launched his own PG Collection, while still employed by the family business, which enraged his own father and uncle who realised such a move could become a threat to the family name.

Paolo was fired in September 1980 after 28 years in the family business but this only stoked the fires further and ended with Paolo testifying against his own father, Aldo Gucci, in a tax fraud case that saw the latter sent to prison.

PPR has not commented on the news.

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