The embattled Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier and his business partner Olivier Thomas should stand trial in France on charges relating to the disappearance of dozens of works by Picasso more than a decade ago, a French court has said.
On November 7 in Paris, a chamber of the court of appeal handed down the decision which rejects Bouvier’s attempt to annul the long-running legal proceedings.
The charges faced by the pair result from a criminal investigation launched in 2015 when the daughter of Jacqueline Picasso, Catherine Hutin, discovered several works were missing from a storage unit that she leased in a Paris suburb. According to her inventory, about 70 drawings and paintings had vanished. They had been put in storage in 2018 by Olivier Thomas, who had been appointed by Hutin to remove part of Jacqueline Picasso’s collection from an estate on the French Riviera. The storage facility belonged to Bouvier’s company, Art Transit International.
Hutin also said she discovered that two missing portraits of her mother, dated 1957, had been sold by Bouvier to his client Dmitri Rybolovlev, in 2013 for €27m.
Hutin says she was alerted by a restorer who claims he was called in 2012 by Thomas and Jean-Marc Peretti, also a business partner of Bouvier, to undertake light conservation work on five works in her storage unit. The conservator also testified that, one year later, he restored three other works by Picasso at Bouvier’s headquarters in the Geneva Freeport. All of the works appear on the list of missing items.
Thomas denied having any knowledge of this, although some of the works appeared in photographs found in his computer. Peretti did not face any charges. Bouvier also denied any wrongdoing, claiming he had purchased the two portraits from late Parisian gallery owner Jean-Marc Aittouares. But the investigators found no trace of such a transaction.
Bouvier also said that he had paid €9m to Hutin for the works in 2010, but the investigation concluded that these payments “corresponded to 13 other paintings”, sold by Hutin through Thomas at an earlier date, and “none of them appears in the list of the diverted properties”.
Bouvier and Thomas were charged with possession of stolen goods and the latter also stands accused of fraud. Last June, the prosecutor requested both men be sent to trial. But the decision, relying on the investigating judge, was suspended pending an appeal launched by Bouvier seeking to halt proceedings. Bouvier claimed that the investigation was biased and flawed by a series of irregularities, including contacts with Rybolovlev’s lawyer showing collusion with his former archenemy (Bouvier and Rybolovlev settled their nine-year legal battle in December 2023).
But last week the Paris court rejected all of Bouvier’s objections, stating that “no evidence of partiality” was demonstrated by any of the investigating magistrates or policemen.
Hutin’s lawyer, Anne-Sophie Nardon, tells The Art Newspaper her client is relieved by the prospect of a trial: “She has been waiting for a decade for justice be done and her works to be restituted. This perfectly grounded decision represents a decisive step towards the truth”.
Bouvier’s lawyer, Philippe Valent, says he has appealed to the high court “to cancel this ruling”. In a statement, he denounces a judgement “which denies the occult manoeuvring between the parties as well as the disloyalty of the magistrates and investigators”. The court, he says, “has sided with a frenzied corporatism, which raises fears for the state of law in a democracy.” He insisted that “Ms Hutin filed an absurd complaint for the alleged theft of works she had been paid for”.
