Bouvier-Rybolovlev affair

The Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was bought by Yves Bouvier for about 80 million dollars in 2013, resold right away to Dmitry Rybolovlev for 127.5 million, then sold at Christie's in New York, in November 2017, for 450.3 million. Bouvier, a Swiss dealer and a leading figure in art storage and shipping at the Geneva Freeport, sourced some forty works for the Russian billionaire between 2003 and 2014, for nearly 2 billion dollars. Rybolovlev believed him to be an agent paid on commission; Bouvier said he was a seller free to set his own price. The collector accused him of pocketing close to a billion in hidden markups, and proceedings ran in Monaco, Geneva and Singapore before the two men settled at the end of 2023. For insurers, the affair shows three prices for one painting in four years, and the question of which of them serves as agreed value. The price the insured paid is not always market value, and a value set from an invoice can carry a markup that no one appraised. An underwriter insuring a painting held in a freeport also faces a place where the same company stores, ships and sometimes sells, and where the buyer does not always see what he is buying. That opacity weighs on provenance as much as on value, and anti money laundering regulators watch it closely. Not to be confused with authenticity risk, which concerns the attribution of the work, whereas here no one disputed the paintings, only their price.