NEW YORK (AP) — The Russian billionaire who accused Sotheby’s of collaborating with a Swiss art dealer to con him out of tens of millions of dollars cried Friday as he testified about his discovery that he was part of an all-too-common world con game. “The art market needs to be more transparent.”
The emotional moment came like a fertilizer pole Dmitry RybolovlevSpeaking through an interpreter, he completed two days of testimony in Manhattan federal court in support of his lawsuit against Sotheby’s.
Rybolovlev, who was once worth at least $7 billion, said he trusted his trader. Yves Bouvier.
“So when you trust people, and I’m not someone who trusts easily, but when a person is like a member of your family,” Rybolovlev said, lowering his head briefly before wiping tears from his eyes and continuing: “There comes a point in time when you begin to fully and completely trust a person.” what.”
Rybolovlev is trying to hold Sotheby’s responsible for what his lawyers said was a loss of more than $160 million. His legal team said Bouvier earned the money by purchasing famous works of art from Sotheby’s auction house before selling them to Rybolovlev at high prices. In all, Rybolovlev spent about $2 billion on art from 2002 to 2014 as he built a world-class art collection.
After questioning, Sotheby’s lawyer persuaded Rybolovlev to admit that he trusted his advisers and did not insist on seeing documents that might show exactly where his money was going, even when he bought works of art sometimes worth tens of millions of dollars.
In his testimony, Rybolovlev blamed murky practices in the avant-garde art world for hurting him financially.
“Because when the largest company in the industry with such a deep reputation does this, it makes it very difficult for clients like me who have business experience to know what is going on,” he said, supporting his lawyer’s arguments that Sotheby’s either knew – Or he should have known that Rybolovlev had been cheated and told him about it.
When his lawyer asked him why he was suing Sotheby’s, Rybolovlev said: “So, it’s not a question of money. Well, not just of money. It’s important for the art market to be more transparent. Because… when the biggest company in the industry is involved… In a business of this kind, as you know, customers have no chance.
In an opening statement earlier in the week, Sotheby’s lawyer Sarah Chudovsky said Rybolovlev was “trying to make an innocent party pay for what someone else did to them.”
Rybolovlev’s lawyer, Daniil Kornstein, said in his editorial that Sotheby’s had joined in a complex fraud.
“Sotheby’s had choices, but they chose greed,” he said.
Rybolovlev claims he was deliberately deceived by Bouvier and a London-based executive at Sotheby’s when he purchased 38 pieces of art.
Only four are in dispute at trial, including Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” Latin for “savior of the world,” which Rybolovlev’s lawyers say Bouvier bought from Sotheby’s for $83 million and then resold to Rybolovlev. The next day for over $127. million. In 2017, Rybolovlev sold it through Christie’s for $450 million, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.
In December, Bouvier’s lawyers announced that Bouvier had reached a settlement with Rybolovlev under undisclosed terms ensuring that neither would comment on their past disputes.
Bouvier’s Swiss lawyers, David Beaton and Yves Klein, said earlier this week that Bouvier “strongly disputes any allegation of fraud.”
They said the allegations against Bouvier in New York were dismissed “by authorities around the world”, with all nine legal cases against him in Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, Monaco and Geneva, Switzerland, halted.
In 2018, Rybolovlev was included in a list released by the Trump administration of 114 Russian politicians and businessmen who it said were linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
However, he was not included on a list of Russian oligarchs sanctioned after Russia attacked Ukraine, and Kornstein told jurors that his client, who studied medicine and became a cardiologist before turning to work, had not lived in Russia for 30 years.