30.05.2021 – 17:18
“Salvator Mundi” by Vinci, highlights another side of the coin. What do you need to know about the great legal battle that the art world has seen?
It’s the biggest legal battle the art world has ever seen: a Russian oligarch who claims to have been tricked into buying multimillion-dollar masterpieces by an art dealer from Switzerland who says it was just business.
After six years of litigation in multiple jurisdictions, the letters seem to be turning once again into a saga so dramatic that it has been given a name worthy of a screenplay: The Bouvier Case.
Russian tycoon Dmitry Rybolovlev has pursued Swiss art dealer and freeport storage tycoon Yves Bouvier around the world for years in various courts, claiming he was defrauded of $ 1 billion for 38 exorbitant works of art, which he had been sold by Bouvier over a decade.
But in a new twist, Bouvier told CNN he was preparing a multibillion-dollar counterattack against Rybolovlev after taking legal action in Singapore in February, claiming the long court battle with Rybolovlev had damaged businesses and reputation.
Matters meanwhile, have employed so far, an army of lawyers and managers, on both sides.
The fraud also includes the purchase in 2013 of what is now the most expensive and enigmatic painting in the world: “Salvator Mundi”, which is thought by some to be the work of Leonardo da Vinci, despite years of debate over its authenticity, a work in which, Bouvier made an estimate of more than 50 percent.
Once believed to be a copy or work of Leonardo’s studio, Salvator Mundi was purchased in 2005 by a consortium of speculative art dealers under $ 10,000. Eight years later, after the painting was restored and declared the work of Renaissance craftsman, Bouvier bought it for $ 80 million. The dealer immediately sold it, for $ 127.5 million, to his then-client, Rybolovlev, according to an invoice referred to in court letters and receiving a 1 per cent commission. And while the oligarch later auctioned off the painting for $ 450 million – in 2017 – to an anonymous buyer now believed to be Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, he still claims Bouvier cheated on him. This is a claim that Bouvier denies.
Rybolovlev declined to be interviewed about the story, but a spokesman for Dmitry Rybolovlev’s family told CNN: “These cases are being fought in the courts where we are waiting to prove what happened and that Mr. Bouvier’s fantastic story is false. For now, what is most obvious is that Bouvier does not dispute it: as an art consultant, he pretended to help his clients assemble an art collection at a cost of $ 2 billion while secretly harvesting half of this the price for itself ”.
However, Bouvier denies that he was an “art adviser”, a case that has been at the heart of lawsuits and accusations by Rybolovlev of breach of trust.
“I am an art dealer. The contracts prepared by Rybolovlev’s lawyers and all my invoices clearly describe me as a “seller”. “Rybolovlev has never been able to convince a single judge or prosecutor, otherwise, in any jurisdiction, for the very simple reason that his claims do not correspond to the reality of our contractual relationship,” he told CNN.
The legal battle saga involves many of the problems that regulators have identified with the growing global art market. Art, in the wrong hands, has become another commodity, to circulate money with little responsibility.
“Salvator Mundi”, meanwhile, has not been seen since the record sale. But it returned as a title in April, after a French documentary claimed that the painting had been the subject of a diplomatic row between Paris and Riyadh, amid doubts about its authenticity and a request from the kingdom to appear on the Louvre.
The $ 450 million question: Where is Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’? CNN addressed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but there is still no response.
