Fiat Chairman Umberto Agnelli Dies

Umberto Agnelli, the chairman of Italian carmaker Fiat, has died after a brief battle against cancer, just 16 months after his famous brother Gianni also succumbed to the disease.

Agnelli, 69, took over the top job last year shortly after his brother Gianni died in January 2003 at the age of 81.

The news could raise fresh uncertainty about the commitment to Italy's largest industrial group of the Agnelli family which founded the carmaker more than 100 years ago.

Fiat has been battling its worst business crisis and its banks have an option to convert a three billion euro loan into equity from 2005 which could make them the automaker's top shareholders, supplanting family holding Ifil.

Umberto Agnelli was once considered open to the idea of selling Fiat's loss-making auto operations but he shifted direction after taking over and pinned the company's future on the core businesses of car and truck manufacturing.

To millions of soccer fans, Agnelli was best known as the honorary chairman of Serie A club Juventus, which has won more Italian championships than any other team.

His funeral was set to be held on Saturday afternoon, a source close to the family said, after family, colleagues and friends pay their last respects at Fiat's corporate centre in Turin, where his coffin will lie from 9.00 a.m. (0700 GMT).

Agnelli died only three weeks after the company announced that he was ill. His rapid demise is the latest blow to one of the Italy's most glamorous families, whose fame in Italy is compared with the Kennedys in the United States.

Umberto Agnelli's son Giovannino, who was being groomed to take over the family business, died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 33. In 2000, Gianni Agnelli's son Edoardo, who never came to terms with the huge weight of his family ancestry, committed suicide by leaping from a viaduct.

Umberto's father Edoardo died in a plane crash in 1935 and his mother in a car accident three years later.

Following Gianni's death last year, Umberto Agnelli took the reins at Fiat along with Chief Executive Giuseppe Morchio, a former Pirelli executive who is leading the automaker's sweeping restructuring aimed at stemming deep losses.

With Agnelli's death, the family leadership mantle passes to a much younger generation who have little experience in managing a company whose success was emblematic of Italy's post-war economic boom.