Aparecida Schunck, the mother of Ecclestone’s third wife, Fabiana Flosi, was reportedly seized on Friday night near her home in Sao Paulo. Her kidnappers are demanding the ransom — thought to be the biggest in Brazilian history — be paid in pounds sterling.
The kidnapping is another blow to Brazil ahead of the 2016 Rio Olympics, which are beset with fears over the Zika virus, law and order and terrorism.
The Games are due to open in less than two weeks with the country experiencing its worst economic crisis for decades.
Ecclestone, 85, one of the most powerful men in sport, married Fabiana, 38, in 2012, three years after meeting her at the Brazilian Grand Prix, where she was vice-president of marketing.
The Brazilian press has reported that Schunck, 67, was snatched on Friday night near her home in the Interlagos district of Brazil’s biggest city.
The criminals are reportedly demanding a ransom of £28mn for her release and have stipulated that the money be split into four plastic bags, a source close to the police investigation told Brazilian magazine Veja.
It is claimed that the criminals have already been in touch with the Ecclestone family. Fabiana is said to be close to her mother and the pair have been pictured together on trips to London and at Formula One race days.
In a Facebook post on Mother’s Day Fabiana wrote: “Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers, and especially mine. There are no words to thank so much love and dedication. Thank you Mum, I love you.”
There has been no confirmation of the kidnap from authorities in Brazil or word from the Ecclestone family.
A source close to the family said Ecclestone’s daughter Petra, 27, was currently in Los Angeles and was quite possibly unaware of the news. A spokesman for her sister Tamara, 32, said she did not want to comment.
Ecclestone, who was born in Suffolk, the son of a trawlerman, has been the hands-on supremo in Formula One for four decades. He left school at 16 and gained a love of speed as a promising car and motorcycle racer. However, a crash at Brands Hatch in 1951 ended his competitive career. He remained on the fringes of the motor racing sport until the Sixties when he became the manager of Jochen Rindt, who won the Formula One drivers’ championship posthumously in 1970, having crashed at the Italian circuit of Monza.
In 1971, he bought the Brabham racing team and became a key figure as he and other team leaders tried to gain control of TV rights. In 1978, he became chief executive of the Formula One Constructors’ Association and gradually assumed power over the sport.
He was hugely successful promoting Formula One not just as a sport but as a brand, making it enormously valuable to sponsors and advertisers, and spreading the Grand Prix circuit to new parts of the world.
By the late Nineties, Ecclestone possessed Britain’s largest self-made fortune and he is now the fourth-richest person in the UK, with an estimated £3.2bn fortune. He divorced his wife of 25 years, Croatian model Slavica Radic, with whom he had Tamara and Petra, to marry Flosi, a Brazilian.
Kidnapping was common in Brazil a decade ago, with several people seized each day and often ransomed for only a few hundred dollars. A crackdown by police dramatically cut the number of abductions and the crime has become rare today