Russian billionaire mounts international battle against Sotheby’s
London/Geneva — Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev was hunting for masterpieces when a Swiss dealer e-mailed his team about a chance to see "a bomb of beauty and sensuality". The Russian flew to Vienna by private jet and was whisked off to view a canvas depicting women floating in a gilded sea, Gustav Klimt’s Water Serpents II. Soon after the September 2012 viewing, the Russian agreed to buy the work in a deal that earned the Swiss dealer, Yves Bouvier, a 2% commission. But according to Rybolovlev’s legal team, there was more to the Klimt sale than the billionaire was told at the time — a revelation that now threatens to pull Sotheby’s, one of the world’s largest auction houses, into the art world’s biggest international scandal. There were a handful of people on site for the viewing including one man, Rybolovlev’s advisers say, to whom the Russian wasn’t introduced. Rybolovlev says he learned only later who the man was: Samuel Valette, Sotheby’s vice-chairman of private sales wo...
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