Flavio Briatore's wife says yacht seizure made her breast milk dry up

The wife of Flavio Briatore, the flamboyant former head of the Renault Formula One team, has denounced Italian police for the way they seized his yacht in a dispute over allegedly unpaid tax. Elisabetta Gregoraci, a one-time Wonderbra model, said she had found the raid so shocking that she could no longer breastfeed their baby.

A judge ordered the chartered £17m Force Blue to be impounded on suspicion that Briatore, 60, the part-owner of Queens Park Rangers football club, was guilty of tax-dodging. The raid on the triple-decked, 203ft vessel — which has six suites, a spa, a gym, a swimming pool and a disco — came days after Briatore had appeared in an F1 paddock for the first time since he was banned from operating in motorsport until 2013 for his role in Nelson Piquet’s deliberate crash in the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix.



Gregoraci, 30, a former television showgirl, was on board with Falco, their two-month-old son, on May 20 when three patrol boats of the Guardia di Finanza, who deal with tax offences, circled the yacht off La Spezia, northwest Italy, with sirens blaring. More than a dozen officers came aboard and told her she had to leave.

“I burst into tears, what else could I do? I grabbed a couple of things for Falco and I left. I had to leave the cot, the baby-changing unit, the medicine, the special products for cleaning him,” Gregoraci said.



The yacht, whose chandeliers and napkins among other furnishings are stamped with the initials “FB” for Force Blue — they also match Flavio Briatore — had become the baby’s home while the family waited to move to a new apartment in Monte Carlo.

“It was a trauma for me and for the baby,” Gregoraci said last week. “I lost my milk. And my son had to get used to artificial milk in a big hurry. The paediatrician suggested a good one to me, but no artificial milk will ever be the same as a mummy’s. It’s not as if we were running away. The yacht was already on its way to port.”