Bouvier Affair | Hacker News Reader

Bouvier Affair

en.wikipedia.org

34 pointsCaiero13 comments

So, use arbitrage to make money is fraud when you're dealing with billionaires?

I've investigated it, and it turns out I paid my cellphone vastly more than it cost Samsung to build! I was defrauded!

As others pointed out, it is pretty surreal that it is a Russian oligarch who ripped off the entire Russian population to enrich themselves with the complicity of top Russian officials and those in powers that is complaining.

> I've investigated it, and it turns out I paid my cellphone vastly more than it cost Samsung to build! I was defrauded!

Did Samsung lie to you about how much the phone cost to build?

It's hard to have sympathy for the people he's ripping off.

The people he's ripping off are, if you trace the trail far enough, the taxpayers of the world. His use of freeports was a novel approach to money laundering by way of art sales.

The use of freeports seems orthogonal to the fraud allegations outlined. Can you explain how they are related?

Bouvier was a major actor in and a proponent of the establishment of freeports. The affair tells you a lot about what the art world has become and how the richest évadés the obligations which befell the normal citizen.

Probably because they lost more money than most people will see in their lifetime and were largely unaffected by it.

This brings up an interesting legal issue...

https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-fraud-free-speech?share=1

https://www.npr.org/2012/02/22/147257716/is-a-lie-just-free-...

https://pomlaw.com/monitor-issues/free-speech-vs-corporate-l...

If he had just said he thought the art was worth this much. He would probably would have been fine.

A documentary was made involving some of the people and events surrounding this affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Leonardo

So, if a used car dealer convinced me that my car isn’t worth much, and gets me to sell it to him for cheap, and then resells it for twice what he paid, I can then sue him for defrauding me? Or does it only work if he sells it to the National Gallery? Or does it only work that way if you’re a multimillionaire and politically connected? Trying to understand why this is any different, and why the elites are protected but I’m getting offered $500 for my BMW, and it’s ok.

  > [he] defrauded his clients by misrepresenting the original cost of art works and subsequently overcharging them

He bought low and sold high?

Sounds a lot like capitalism at work.

He bought low, lied about how low he bought, then sold high. It's the middle bit that was problematic.

The larger problem for him was that one of the people he was selling to was a Russian oligarch who them made it his life's work to go after Bouvier.

tl;dr - it got problematic.

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