Richard Lugner, flamboyant Austrian construction billionaire

In June Richard Lugner, an Austrian billionaire, married his sixth wife, an actress named Simone Reiländer, at a ceremony in Vienna City Hall on which the country’s media feasted. He was 91 and she 42, but that evidently did not inhibit the couple. “We had a very long wedding night, longer than the wedding day,” the bride revealed with a smile.
Four months before that, Lugner had gone to the Vienna Opera Ball with Priscilla Presley, Elvis’s former wife, on his arm, and the pair waltzed the night away. That marked the 31st consecutive year in which Lugner had attended the ball in the (lavishly remunerated) company of one of the world’s best-known women. Previous dance partners had included Joan Collins, Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Geri Halliwell, Jane Fonda and Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York.
At other points in his life Lugner had starred in an Austrian version of the American reality television show The Osbournes, twice mounted quixotic bids for the Austrian presidency, and sought unsuccessfully to represent Austria in the Eurovision Song Contest.
Lugner was a showman, a self-confessed libertine and a gift to his country’s gossip columnists, but he was no fool. He also happened to be one of Austria’s most astute and successful entrepreneurs — a property and construction tycoon widely known as Mörtel (mortar or concrete).
Indeed, he exploited the media as much as the media exploited him. “What is embarrassing for me is something I decide alone, and not the media or anyone else,” he said.
Richard Siegfried Lugner was born in Vienna in 1932, and witnessed the Anschluss — Hitler’s annexation of Austria — when he was six. He saw his father, Richard, a lawyer, for the last time at Christmas in 1942, when he was ten. Shortly afterwards the older Richard Lugner was sent to fight for the Nazis on the Eastern Front. There he was captured by the Soviet Red Army in what is now Ukraine and died in a prison camp.
His mother, Leopoldine, shepherded Lugner and his younger brother through the rest of the war, and Lugner came of age a driven man. “Success is the only thing that counts,” he told the Austrian news magazine Profil.
He graduated from a construction college in 1953, joined a Viennese construction company and moved on to the construction department of Mobil Oil where, he said, “I worked like a madman.” In 1962, aged 30, he launched his own building company with just two employees.
No job was too small for him. His first contract was to renovate a hotel whose clients booked rooms by the hour. He built petrol stations and restored old buildings. The company gradually grew until Lugner landed his first big contract in the late 1970s.
He heard rumours that Saudi Arabia was planning to build Vienna’s first mosque, and spent a year secretly preparing for the tendering process. He flew to Istanbul to study mosques. He worked out the proposed building’s exact alignment with Mecca. He submitted a lower bid than his rivals, and won the contract.
The mosque opened on the banks of the Danube in 1979 with a minaret 32m high: Lugner had himself paid for a little extra height for effect.
Thereafter he was a man in demand. He renovated Vienna’s main Jewish synagogue, a Greek Orthodox church, the headquarters of the Opec fund for international development and various shopping centres.
In 1987 he bought the site of an old factory in one of Vienna’s poorer areas and built a large shopping mall, Lugner City, which opened in 1990. He introduced celebrity appearances and shows in the central atrium, and pressed for a relaxation of Austria’s conservative opening hours.
Lugner City proved a great success, expanding repeatedly until it housed more than 100 stores. He followed it by building a huge entertainment complex, Lugner Kino. By the late 1990s his company had more than 700 employees, but it ran into trouble after he handed the management over to his two sons.
Facing bankruptcy, he sold Lugner City to a subsidiary of Volksbank. He leased the mall back and rebuilt his fortunes so successfully that by 2013 he had bought the subsidiary and regained ownership of the mall.
All this was faithfully recorded by the Austrian media, for whom Lugner was the gift that kept on giving.
There were his marriages. His first to his childhood sweetheart, Christine Gmeiner, lasted from 1961 to 1978 and produced two sons, Alexander and Andreas. His second to Cornelia Hahn lasted four years from 1979 to 1983. That same year he was briefly engaged to Sonja Jeannine, an actress with whom he had a daughter, Nadine, but they never married.
His third wife, Susanne Dietrich, fell into a coma after a cosmetic surgery operation and died in 1989. In 1991 he married Christina, also known as “Mausi”, with whom he had another daughter, Jacqueline, in 1993.
By then he was a fixture on Austria’s social scene, and that same year he began his practice of paying beautiful or celebrated women very substantial sums to visit Lugner City then join him in his box at the annual Vienna Opera Ball.
This practice occasionally caused controversy, as in 2011 when he invited Karima el-Mahroug, alias Ruby, the 18-year-old dancer with whom Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister, had been accused of paying for under-age sex. The ball’s organisers were outraged, but Ruby appeared to enjoy the attention. “I can’t waltz,” she told reporters. “I can only belly dance.”
In 1998 Lugner ran for president and finished fourth with 9.9 per cent of the vote. He ran again in 2016, receiving just 2.2 per cent. Whether he was serious about politics, or merely burnishing his brand, was unclear. “I would ensure more glamour in the Hofburg, because the political power of the federal president is very limited,” he said. But his talent for self-promotion was boundless.
In 2003 the Austrian broadcaster ATV began airing The Lugners, a reality television show, and followed him, Christina and their daughter day and night. In 2007 he and Christina divorced, and the show segued into one about his search for a new bride.
He found one in Cathy Schmitz, a German bunny girl 57 years his junior whom he married in flamboyant style at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace, the former summer residence of the Habsburg emperors. Asked if she had married him for money, he replied: “I have a young wife and she has a rich husband, and if we’re both happy then that’s OK with me.” The marriage lasted 809 days.
In 2010 Lugner released a song about him and his women, I Bin Der Lugner — Ole, Ole (“I am that Lugner”), which entered the Austrian charts. The following year he sought unsuccessfully to represent Austria in the Eurovision Song Contest. He had Botox injections to look younger, survived two brushes with cancer and in June married Reilander.
That would be his last marriage, he promised, and so it proved. A month later he was rushed to hospital with a ruptured heart valve.
Richard Siegfried Lugner, entrepreneur and socialite, was born on October 11, 1932. He died on August 12, 2024, aged 91