Carl-Clemens Veltins, 61, claims that he is entitled to a stake in the 200-year-old Veltins brewery company in North Rhine-Westphalia, which produces one of Germany’s best-selling pilsners.

He alleges that his mother, who ran the business, misled him into signing away his right to the company on the morning after his 18th birthday party in May 1980, and he then received nothing in her will when she died in 1994.

The entire inheritance went instead to his sisters Susanne — a billionaire who now runs the company — and Frauke, who he is now suing, Handelsblatt reports.

Mr Veltins is notorious in Germany for a string of convictions related to burglary, cocaine and guns, which were widely covered in the German press.

He told German magazine Focus that he did not behave like “a saint” and was “not proud of a lot of things that happened, but that doesn’t mean that my family was allowed to ignore me”.