All people consulted related to the deceased’s closest circle Fernando Fernandez Tapias They agree in highlighting the immense generosity of the businessman with his intimates and especially with some of the women he admired.
The shipowner was splendid with his friends, both with the rich like him and with those who were in trouble and needed his help. Not to mention how detached he was towards the women who passed through his life.
The first was Victoria Riva de Luna. Fefé married her when he was 22 years old. That first marriage, from which his four oldest children were born, served to begin his successful career as a businessman. Galician like Fefé, Chiqui was the daughter of Ángel Riva Suardíaz, admiral and prosperous owner of Astilleros Cantábrico. Under the tutelage of his father-in-law, a very young Fernández Tapias entered the naval sector, where little by little he rose through the ranks until he acquired a colossal fortune that some sources put up to 3,000 million euros. But his first marriage ended with his wife in a medical center. Chiqui Riva had to be treated because of the physical and mental health problems that affected her.
The second marriage, with Juana García-Courel, mother of two other children, ended with the most expensive divorce of the time. The shipowner had to pay his ex-wife 2,000 million pesetas (12 million euros) thanks to the work of the lawyer Concha Sierra, defender of Juana’s interests and who had also achieved very favorable divorces for her clients Esther y Alicia Koplowitz, when they ended their marriage with cousins Alberto Alcocer y Alberto Cortina.
However, once separated, when Juana became seriously ill, Tapias was very attentive and careful with his former wife. Women, and especially those who are beautiful and attractive, have been his weakness, as was evident when the businessman went crazy with love for Mar Flores. Not only did he go out of his way to help her through the problems caused by her separation from Carlo Constanza, the Italian who was the model’s first husband, and the custody of her son.
Tapìas also offered him an apartment in the exclusive El Viso neighborhood of Madrid, although, as we have already said, they did not get to release it, since the appearance of the cover of interview with Mar Flores and Alessandro Lequio embraced in a bed at the d’Inghilterra hotel in Rome, a few meters from the Torlonia palace, belonging to the Italian’s family, he cut the relationship short, leaving Tapias devastated.
It was not the only valuable gift that the billionaire businessman had given the twenty-year-old from Usera. Previously, Fefé had given her lover a Jaguar that Mar Flores continued driving after the traumatic and high-profile breakup.
Less known is that Fefé also helped another beauty from that time, who remains so today: the model María José Suárez, Miss Spain 1996, a woman he loved. We met María José with romances as famous as the one she lived with the tennis player Feliciano Lopez and currently with the rider Alvaro Muñoz Escassi, father of one of the children of Lara Dibildos.
María José Suárez, Today, a bridal fashion businesswoman, she did a program on Radio Intercontinental in Madrid on weekends and the sponsor was Fefé, president of CEIM, the Madrid businessmen.
Now, after his death and with the five oldest children faced with Nuria González, widow and third wife of the shipowner, the time has come to distribute a complicated inheritance. Many of those who previously frequented the couple’s mansion in Puerta de Hierro wonder if the couple will still be there. Picasso that hung on one of the walls of the living room.