Former Swiss billionaire in crisis to sell Aston Martin

Europe’s crisis is imposing fiscal discipline on working households, spendthrift governments — and even the occasional billionaire. Thomas Straumann, who until last year owned an Aston Martin DB5 used to promote the 1965 James Bond movie Thunderball, a majority stake in luxury watchmaker H Moser & Cie and a hotel in the Gstaad resort, Switzerland, was forced to let go of a few of his favorite things.

The 49-year-old Swiss executive in November cut his stake in Straumann Holding AG, the dental-implant maker founded by his grandfather and father, for the first time in five years after the stock dropped by a third over six months, erasing about $931 million in market value. He put two hotels up for sale as well as his stake in Moser. Now, the Aston Martin is on the block too, with a 3-million-pound ($4.6 million) asking price.

Until the stock recovers, he’s no longer a billionaire. “The key feature of this recent crisis is that it wasn’t just a downturn in individual assets, but over all financial markets,” said Martin Brown, a professor at the Swiss Institute of Banking and Finance at the University of St Gallen. “Richer people lost more, proportionately.”

Straumann, an engineer by training and a self-described bon vivant who had cigar-smoking salons built at his hotels in Gstaad and Basel, has seen his net worth decline to $708 million from about $1.18 billion two years ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. “Until now I could juggle everything, but the economic environment has changed and demands that I am much more focused,” Straumann told Hotelier magazine in an interview.