It is far from Perm, Russia. The harsh town in the Ural Mountains, 900 miles east of Moscow, was once known as the “Gateway to the Gulag” and was the stronghold of the Soviet Union. the most terrifying labor camp For political prisoners – to Monte Carlo.
Dmitry Rybolovlev was a 22-year-old medical student when the Perm 36 camp was closed in 1987.
Four years later, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Rybolovlev gave up his career as a cardiologist and cornered the newly privatized potassium fertilizer business in Russia.
This was a winning move. In 2010 he sold his shares. Uralkali For $6.5 billion.
And he traded Perm for one of Monaco’s most famous addresses, a two-story $300 million penthouse in Monaco. belle époque I can see my friend Prince Albert’s pink palace in the distance across the harbor.
Until now, Ryborov, 57, was used to winning.
he owns monaco soccer clubits stadium located in the heart of the world’s richest square mile, its multi-million dollar real estate portfolio, its businesses spread across the globe, its private Boeing 737 and 250 million dollar yacht, Anna is.
He watches soccer with Monaco’s Grand Duke Albert, who is battling corruption allegations, and befriends other fans such as former French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
And his daughter Ekaterina, now 35, who is married to Uruguayan businessman and politician Juan Sartori, bought an apartment at 15 Central Park West in 2011 with $88 million of her father’s money.
Two years later, Ekaterina too Purchase the legendary Greek island Skorpiosonce owned by Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, Jackie Kennedy’s second husband.
Even his divorce from Elena, his wife of 23 years, in 2008 was called “.”divorce of the century”
Elena, who met Rybolovlev in medical school, accused him of trying to hide his wealth from her by buying up mansions from Hawaii to Greece to Central Park West.
The Rybolovlevs’ cohabitation was detailed in Elena’s shocking divorce filing in 2008, which revealed that Elena was constantly having affairs with women young enough to become his daughters. He claims to have shared it with friends. She claimed that her husband knew about her sex life even before their divorce.
One of them is 62,000 square feet, she revealed. The Maison de L’Amitier in Palm Beach was purchased from Donald Trump in the midst of the 2008 recession for more than double what Trump paid for it. His wife did no due diligence before making the purchase, she said.
(Trump’s initial purchase of this house is said to have been the cause of his falling out with Jeffrey Epstein.)
In documents filed in Geneva and Palm Beach, Fla., Elena said Ekaterina was manipulated by her father, bribed with lavish gifts to deceive her mother, and ultimately became nervous due to family stress. He claimed to have become weak.
Rybolovlev in turn had Elena arrested in Cyprus, where he happened to own a bank, for stealing a $28 million ring.
She later proved that he gave it to her and walked away with about $3.5 billion in the divorce.
Rybolovlev did not accumulate money and power in silence.
As boss of Uralkali, Rybolovlev was accused of turning Berezniki, an old mining town in the Ural Mountains from which his potash was extracted 1,500 feet underground, into anything. new york times He said the city is “always on guard against being sucked into the ground” because of the sinkhole.
In 1996, he was arrested on charges after fleeing to Switzerland to escape the power of violent gangs that controlled all of Russia. planning a murder He committed the crime of a rival businessman and served almost a year in prison before being acquitted.
But until he got involved in the art world, he was someone who was used to winning all the time.
Now he has become a loser many times for roles in a series of works. International lawsuit over alleged fraud.
The incident centered around Monaco and spread its tentacles from Singapore to Switzerland and eventually Manhattan.
The dispute began in 2015, when Rybolovlev engaged in a battle in Monaco with billionaire Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier, accusing him of overcharging for masterpieces he had bought at Sotheby’s.
The charges were apparently simple. Mr. Rybolovlev claimed that he believed that Mr. Bouvier was acting as an intermediary in the purchase of art; instead, Mr. Bouvier purchased the works himself, resold them to Mr. Rybolovlev at an inflated price, and He claimed that the organization was making far more money than Rybolovlev had thought. I was paying.
However, this suspicion became a large-scale story called “.Bouvier incident”
Bouvier was arrested early on in connection with the incident, but has since been released. Rybolovlev himself was questioned at the time about his attempts to bribe officials to nail Bouvier.
Finally the judge of Monaco dismissed the lawsuitsaid there had been serious violations due to troubling “connections” discovered between investigators and lawyers representing Rybolovlev.
In the end, it “almost destroyed half of the principality,” said one lawyer who has practiced in Monaco and Italy for decades.
“The scope of this thing cannot be underestimated. All the old accusations that Monaco is corrupt and dirty have been revived.”
Other lawsuits followed around the world, culminating in January in federal court in Manhattan.
Mr. Rybolovlev then claimed that Sotheby’s colluded with Mr. Bouvier and deceived him into paying a high price for four works, including “Salvator Mundi,” a depiction of Christ by Leonardo da Vinci and known as “The Lost Leonardo.” He was accused of forcing him to pay the price.
He sued for $380 million in damages for paying a total of $1 billion more for 38 works of art over 12 years.
According to court documents, Mr. Bouvier bought Da Vinci in 2013 for $83 million and sold it the next day to Mr. Rybolovlev for $127.5 million.
It appears that Rybolovlev and his lawyers never made a simple phone call to Sotheby’s to find out how much Bouvier paid the selling company before reselling the painting.
And he filed lawsuits over three other works of art. Amedeo Modigliani’s stone sculpture “Tete”. René Magritte’s “Le Domaine Darnheim.” And in Gustav Klimt’s Wasserschlangen II, Sotheby’s claims that Bouvier defrauded him for their own benefit as well.
Sotheby’s, a privately held company, has long maintained that it had no knowledge that Mr. Bouvier might have lied and was not responsible for its dealings with Mr. Rybolovlev.
“The amount of abuse Bouvier used was incredible,” a person familiar with the incident told the Post. “He took one point from Rybolovlev. He wasn’t exactly a beauty in the woods. He looked like something out of a movie.”
“Bouvier outsmarted him,” one longtime Monaco lawyer told the Post. “He may be the only person in Dmitry’s life to have done that.”
Mr. Rybolovlev wins again in Manhattan when his lawyer convinces the judge that jurors shouldn’t hear him call him an “oligarch” because it would bias them against him. That’s what I might have thought.
Despite having billions in assets in Russia, the 57-year-old has not been sanctioned by the United States or any other government after President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – activists say in disgust. There is.
“He operates in the West, and some of his actions appear to serve both his own business and the Kremlin’s soft power,” said Rybolovlev, a Russian-born U.S. citizen and anti-corruption official who included Rybolovlev in the report. Activist Ilya Zaslavsky says about what Russians should be Approved by Western countries, he told the Post.
But when the jury returned a verdict against this man they didn’t know was an oligarch, it was surprising. The jury ruled against Rybolovlev and in favor of Sotheby’s, ending years of litigation.
(He and Bouvier settled in December 2023, just before the New York trial, which Bouvier claimed showed he had done nothing wrong.) A source told the art newspaper Geneva prosecutors told the pair to reconcile after determining that Rybolovlev had no criminal case to answer. )
The sting of defeat is no doubt softened by the fact that Mr. Rybolovlev sold Salvator Mundi at Christie’s in 2017 for $450.3 million (a record price for an art work at auction), and apparently Saudi Arabia It was sold to Crown Prince Mohammed bin, the de facto ruler of the country. Saruman.
Dan Cornstein, Mr. Rybolovlev’s Manhattan-based lawyer in the case, told the Post: We reflected that awareness. ”
Marcus Asner of the law firm Arnold & Porter, who represented Sotheby’s at trial, took a different view.
“We were thrilled by the ruling, which reaffirms what we have known all along: Sotheby’s was not involved in any fraud or attempted fraud against Rybolovlev or anyone else,” Asner told the Post. . “It was Dmitry Rybolovlev who did not want to become transparent.”
