More Exciting Than a Soap The saga of Alan Bond has more plot twists than a daytime TV show. The Australian entrepreneur, who financed his country’s 1983 America’s Cup victory over the USA, who bought van Gogh’s Irises for $53.0 million, and who owned a pair of $10 million dollar penthouses in New York and a corporate jet, is spending two and a half years in prison for fraud. The sentence, half of what he could have received, was for failing to disclose a fee to one of the men who invested $6 million of the $12 million attempted bailout money to save the Rothwells Merchant Bank, hit by a run on its funds after the ’87 market crash, and for dishonestly concealing a $16-million success fee received in a financial transaction with a collapsed Australian bank. The bulk of the artworks owned by Bond’s Dallhold Investments was auctioned this summer by Christie’s. The expected $12 million won’t make a dent in the $440 million Dallhold debt. Of the 52 lots only two didn’t sell, and personal records were set for several Australian artists. Right in line with what has been happening in the art market, a Rupert Bunny Edwardian scene sold for $333,333, two-thirds of what Bond had paid for it in the late ‘80s.
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The above is an excerpt from an article by Dr. Elin Lake-Ewald published in the ASA Personal Property Journal, Autumn 1992.
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