Yves Bouvier

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Yves Bouvier (2008)

Yves Bouvier (born September 8, 1963 in Geneva ) is a Swiss businessman and art shipper and dealer.

Life and activity

Yves Bouvier grew up in the company founded in 1946 by his father Jean-Jacques Bouvier, Natural Le Coultre SA . This company is based on other companies that go back to 1859. He succeeded in 1995 as an assistant, two years later as administrative director. Since April 2009 he has been living in Singapore . The company worked in the field of art services, which initially focused on «moving, goods transport, storage of goods; Commercial furniture storage, auction house, mechanical repairs, packaging, workshop and a customs agency, commission and commercial agencies, the same objective and insurance; international transport of goods; Operation of a real estate agency, in particular the acquisition and sale of real estate, rental villas and apartments.

In the context of this activity, other companies were founded over the years, for example Fine Art Transports Natural Le Coultre SA in 1989 , of which Yves Bouvier became the managing director, or the Euroasia Investment holding. 1997 Yves Bouvier becomes managing director of Natural Le Coultre SA and its subsidiaries. He sells the moving, furniture and storage activities to a regional entrepreneur and focuses on storing, moving and preserving works of art. For him, the focus is on the three locations of Geneva, Singapore and Luxembourg , wealthy countries with triple A status.

His "business idea" is to keep the works of art in bonded warehouses , in which no customs duties are due. Works of art can be stored and sold there for as long as you like. The free camps are “discreet hiding places” where the works of art “can be optimally secured, anonymously and undisturbed by tax authorities or wives in the war of divorce to increase in value”. To this end, he initiated the exclusive open-air warehouse in Singapore in 2005 with all amenities for those interested in art. In 2010, he took a stake in the company in Geneva with a hall offering 30,000 m 2 of usable space and costing CHF 80 million, and in 2014 the warehouse at Luxembourg Airport, which was built according to the same model . Further plans are planned for Beijing and Shanghai . Tax investigations by the Swiss authorities (tax debt of 165 million Swiss francs) and the ongoing legal disputes with the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev forced Yves Bouvier to sell his Geneva-based Freeport company.

Yves Bouvier is the founder and promoter of the art project R4 on the Seine island Île Seguin in Paris .

Fraud in the art trade

On February 26, 2015, Yves Bouvier was arrested by the Monegasque authorities on suspicion of fraud. He had defrauded the "Russian entrepreneur and president of the AS Monaco football club, Dmitri Rybolowlew " because Bouvier had presented forged documents for the sale of high-quality works of art and demanded excessive prices. He was allowed to leave Monaco for a deposit of 10 million euros .

Yves Bouvier sold around 40 works of art to Dmitri Rybolovlew for more than 2 billion US dollars. These included works by Picasso, Gaugin, Rothko, Leonardo da Vinci, Matisse and Rodin. The Swiss art dealer has always revealed himself to the Russian entrepreneur as a middleman, but never as the owner of the works of art.

According to Rybolowlew's lawyer, Bouvier's sales are said to have brought in between $ 500 million and $ 1 billion in margins.

A similar case of art fraud occurred a little earlier in 2008. The descendants of the Canadian Lorette Shefner sued a group of art dealers who persuaded the art collector to sell them the painting Pièce de Boeuf by Chaim Soutine below market value. The group then sold the painting to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC for almost double the price. According to court records, Bouvier was responsible for concealing the owner's true identity.

Yves Bouvier also traded in pictures by the German art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi . Among them was, for example, Max Ernst's La Forêt , for which he "ran a discreet offshore company in the British Virgin Islands."

In the context of these incidents, the American art dealer Larry Gagosian accused Yves Bouvier of a conflict of interest , since Bouvier is the owner of the bonded warehouse, to which his customers entrust their valuable art, and acts as an art dealer.

On April 14, 2015, it was reported that Bouvier was stepping down from the management of Le Freeport Luxembourg in order to “focus on the court affairs against him and his other business, according to lawyer” Bouviers in a press release. The commercial director of the art warehouse, David Arendt, would like to comment later. The camp in Geneva has been under the supervision of Swiss politician David Hiler since then .

On September 14, 2015, a Paris investigative court formally opened criminal investigations against Bouvier for the theft of Picasso works of art and demanded a bail of 27 million euros from him.

On November 12, 2015, the Monegasque public prosecutor opened the trial against Bouvier regarding fraud and money laundering.

In February 2016, The New Yorker published an extensive article on the Bouvier affair. One of Bouviers' competitors confirms that "[...] you have to be a billionaire to build duty-free warehouses." That billionaire was Rybolovlev. With the flow of money, Bouvier made his ambitious plans possible to establish exclusive bonded warehouses worldwide.

Regarding Bouvier's strategy to achieve exorbitant margins, the New Yorker mentions: "If a deal with the seller was in sight, Bouvier would agree his own price with Rybolowlew, which was often several million USD higher." Rybolowlew is said to have only given to understand that he will give him the best possible price from the seller, but not that he is the actual seller. Bouvier used this scam ruthlessly. He bought the painting Joueur de Flûte et Femme en Nue by Picasso for EUR 3.5 million and sold it for EUR 25 million. He achieved a margin of USD 60 million for Gustav Klimt's painting Wasserschlangen II . He openly admits his audacity in the article: “If I have duped him, then I'm not only the best art dealer in the world, I'm a genius. I am a stone."

In March 2016, the Singapore Supreme Court decided to hold the lawsuit between Yves Bouvier and Dmitri Rybolovlew in the Singapore International Commercial Court. Yves Bouvier originally tried to convince the court to handle the legal dispute in Switzerland. The Supreme Court rejected this.

On July 6, 2016, an investigation was initiated against Yves Bouvier's business partner, Olivier Thomas. The former Freeport president and art dealer was accused of abuse of trust, fraud, receiving stolen goods and money laundering in Paris. Investigators found photos of the controversial works of art on Olivier Thomas' computer, which he is said to have taken himself. However, Olivier Thomas denies having ever seen the pictures.

Olivier Thomas was temporarily arrested in May 2015 for stealing the Picasso pictures. He allegedly stole the works of art on behalf of Yves Bouvier from Bouvier's Paris storage company Art Transit. The pictures stored there belong to the heiress and stepdaughter of Pablo Picasso, Catherine Hutin-Blay, who noticed the disappearance of the pictures and filed a complaint. According to Hutin-Blay, Yves Bouvier sold two pictures by Picasso, a portrait of a woman and a Spanish woman with a fan , as well as a sketchbook without her consent to Rybolowlew for 36 million euros. On September 24, 2015, Dmitri Rybolovlew handed over the works of art to the French police on his own initiative.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Shareholder agreement for Eurocenter Investment SA, Société Anonyme. Luxembourg B 174.063 of October 4, 2013 from the Official Gazette of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg N ° 2883 of November 15, 2013
  2. ↑ a b Natural Le Coultre, le transport au sommet de son art depuis 150 ans . Tribune des Arts , October 2009 edition
  3. ↑ Extract from the commercial register dated April 17, 2015
  4. ↑ a b Alexis Favre: Yves Bouvier: une ascension fulgurante dans le monde de l'art , Le Temps Suisse , February 27, 2015
  5. ↑ Catherine Nivez: Ce visionnaire qui a parié sur l'Asie , in: Bilan , September 4, 2013
  6. ↑ J. Emil Sennewald and Tobias Timm : In the Bunker of Beauty , in: Die Zeit , April 25, 2013, pp. 55–56
  7. ↑ Freeports, tax-free luxury oases for art treasures . Bavarian television , April 9, 2015, 5 min.
  8. ↑ Katrin Langhans, Jörg Häntzschel: The oligarch pays on it. A Russian billionaire is suing his agent . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of April 9, 2016, p. 13.
  9. ↑ Artinfo24: Yves Bouvier sells his Swiss Freeport company Natural Le Coultre. Retrieved October 27, 2017 .
  10. ^ Sylvain Besson: Monaco: Yves Bouvier, le roi des ports francs en garde à vue , in: Le Temps , February 26, 2015
  11. ↑ Luxemburger Wort : Freeport initiator under attack. Indictments against Yves Bouvier , online edition of February 28, 2015
  12. ↑ Leo Müller: The Suspecten Practices in the Private Art Trade , in: Bilanz , January 8, 2016
  13. ↑ Stephanie Baker and Hugo Miller: The Billionaire, the Dealer, and the $ 186 Million Rothko , in: Bloomberg Markets , April 28, 2015:
  14. ↑ Leo Müller: The Suspecten Practices in the Private Art Trade , in: Bilanz , January 8, 2016
  15. ^ Agence France-Presse: Monaco gives go-ahead to million-dollar art fraud trial between Dmitry Rybolovlev and Yves Bouvier , November 12, 2015
  16. ^ Judith H. Dobrzynski: Bouvier Shenanigans, Chapter Two: Steve Cohen , in: Real Clear Arts blog , March 15, 2015
  17. ^ Supreme Court of the State of New York: Shefner v Jacques de la Beraudiere , November 12, 2013
  18. ↑ J. Emil Sennewald and Tobias Timm : In the Bunker of Beauty , in: Die Zeit , April 25, 2013
  19. ↑ Eileen Kinsella: Gagosian Says Freeport King Yves Bouvier's Activities Pose 'Terrible Conflict of Interest , on: artnet News , September 24, 2015
  20. ↑ Yves Bouvier withdraws ( memento of April 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), in: Tageblatt.lu of April 14, 2015
  21. ↑ Marcus Woeller: Fraud in this area is common , in: Die Welt , July 11, 2015, p. 25
  22. ↑ Swiss art thief? Yves Bouvier is sentenced to high bail. Neue Zürcher Zeitung online, September 15, 2015
  23. ^ Agence France-Presse: Monaco gives go-ahead to million-dollar art fraud trial between Dmitry Rybolovlev and Yves Bouvier , November 12, 2015
  24. ↑ Sam Knight: The Bouvier Affair: How an art-world insider made a fortune by being discreet , in: The New Yorker , February 8th and 15th, 2016
  25. ^ Christian Bütikofer: Billions Trial against Geneva Art Dealers , in: Handelszeitung , March 28, 2016
  26. ↑ Hili Perlson: Art dealer under investigation again as new evidence emerges in case of stolen Picassos linked to Yves Bouvier , in: ArtNet , July 12, 2016
  27. ↑ Ex-Freeport boss Thomas in the sights of the French judiciary ( memento from July 19, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), in: Tageblatt , July 13, 2016
  28. ↑ Olga Grimm-Weissert: Warning for users of duty-free warehouses , in: Handelsblatt , October 15, 2015
  29. ↑ Jörg Häntzschel: Did "Freeport-König" Bouvier sell stolen Picassos? , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , September 16, 2015
  30. ↑ Olga Grimm-Weissert: Again indicted , in: Handelsblatt , September 17, 2015, page 47
  31. ↑ Alexis Favre: Dmitri Rybolovlev remet deux Picasso à la justice française , in: Le Temps , September 24, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Bouvier, Yves
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss entrepreneur and art dealer
DATE OF BIRTH September 8, 1963
PLACE OF BIRTH Geneva