The Bouvier Affair

The Bouvier Affair is the name that art commentators have given to a court battle that started in 2015.

The cases centre around Yves Bouvier, a Swiss art shipper and dealer, as well as a pioneer of freeports, and, among other alleged victims, Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch living in Monaco, former owner of Uralkali, as well as President of AS Monaco football club. In France, Catherine Hutin-Blay, the stepdaughter of Pablo Picasso alleges that Bouvier was complicit in the theft of works from her. . As of early 2018, Bouvier was facing criminal charges in France, Monaco and also in Switzerland after the Geneva Prosecutor opened a new case there.

Prior to 2015, Bouvier was primarily known in the market as an art transporter and curator through his company, Natural Le Coultre; and as a major shareholder and promoter of the Freeport concept.

After having first developed Natural Le Coultre and its links to the Geneva Freeport, Bouvier in 2010 inaugurated the first Singapore Freeport, a 30 000 m2 facility near the airport.

However, in 2012 he became embroiled in a legal case involving Lorette Shefner, a Canadian collector. Shefner’s family claims that she was the victim of a complex fraud, whereby she was persuaded to sell a Soutine painting at a price far below market value, only to see the work later sold to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC for a much higher price.

Separately, de la Béraudière was implicated in the notorious case of Wolfgang Beltracchi, a German forger who was convicted in 2011 of having defrauded a number of collectors, including Daniel Filipacchi, of millions of dollars.

Bouvier’s purported connections to Galerie Jacques de la Béraudière and his ownership of an off-shore entity called Diva Fine Arts led to Bouvier also being connected to the Beltracchi case. He has, however, always denied any connection to Beltracchi and dismissed media coverage as uninformed speculation.

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Wikipedia