The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World
by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian · 7 Oct 2024 · 336pp · 104,899 words
monarchs and the ill-gotten gains of multinational evaders and avoiders. And a short walk from the pool where I learned to swim stood the Geneva Freeport, a cordoned-off warehouse that operated outside Swiss customs regulations. Conceived centuries ago to allow merchants to store grain, the freeport is where oligarchs now
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calling here—everything was just lying around, with no attempt at concealment.” The warehouse in question was not your average mini storage. It was the Geneva Freeport: a place where, since 1888, goods have entered the building and remained there, perhaps even for lifetimes, accruing value, hiding from scrutiny, evading taxes, even
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liminal state. After all, wheat rots. Rice goes bad. Steel rusts. Even wine can be stored for only so long without climate control. When the Geneva Freeport opened in the late nineteenth century, its main feature was a large grain silo, but that fell into disuse as new kinds of wealth slithered
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remained in a suspended state: physically sedentary yet legally in transit. Like Konrad Witz’s painting of Christ on Lac Léman, an object in the Geneva Freeport appears before us but casts no shadow. The facility is a lot like the Hotel California: objects check in, but they never need to leave
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a warehouse not just for their things, but for their hopes, their dreams, their desires. This landed him in lawsuits spanning five jurisdictions, with the Geneva Freeport at the center of it all. Like the Medici scandal that preceded it, Bouvier’s legal battle, fought by a phalanx of lawyers, communications specialists
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of the assistant, and see the other pictures on the walls.” In 1997, Natural le Coultre had rented just two hundred square meters at the Geneva Freeport. By 2013, despite stricter controls regulating the storage of archaeological goods at the facility, and some regulatory requirements on tenants intended to curb money laundering
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compelling banks, funds, and other financial institutions to share client information automatically did not apply to warehouses. The economic anthropologist Oddný Helgadóttir surmises that the Geneva Freeport evolved as a way for the Swiss to accommodate shape-shifting capital. As the European Parliament noted in a 2018 report, because of increased bank
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room walls. Many of his treasures, including Rothko’s No. 6 and Picasso’s Musketeer with Pipe, “lived” in Bouvier’s leased space in the Geneva Freeport and, later, in a sister facility in Singapore, before making their way to Cyprus. Bouvier, for his part, conducted his sales through his own tangle
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,” he went on. In this rarefied world, nobody need touch the ground. * * * • • • It’s fitting that the initial rumblings of betrayal began deep in the Geneva Freeport’s vaults, when Rybolovlev quietly removed some of his paintings from Bouvier’s leased facilities in early 2015 and transported them to Cyprus. Bouvier assumed
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commenting on their past disputes,” said a spokesperson for Rybolovlev. Still, Bouvier didn’t exactly win. In 2017, he sold off his stake in the Geneva Freeport for an undisclosed sum, though he continued to do business with clients there. In 2022, Bouvier sold the Singapore freeport to a Chinese cryptocurrency billionaire
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The Wall Street Journal and Swissinfo, to summarize the men’s conflict. Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini’s The Medici Conspiracy helped me summarize the Geneva Freeport’s first scandal. I also learned a great deal from my copresenters at a panel on the uses of offshore techniques within global art markets
The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite
by Jake Bernstein · 14 Oct 2019 · 470pp · 125,992 words
, the alpine nation performs a similar service for art. The art trade in Switzerland is a multibillion-dollar business.1 At its center is the Geneva Freeport, more than 600,000 square feet of storage space in an industrial area west of the city.2 There, in the main complex, behind security
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contain approximately 1.2 million pieces of art,3 everything from Roman antiquities to an estimated one thousand Picassos.4 Together the goods inside the Geneva Freeport are conservatively valued at more than $100 billion.5 Unlike a museum, nobody ever sees all these treasures together. They are locked away in vaults
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as the art resides within the Freeport, it is tax free. One can buy a painting at auction in New York, ship it to the Geneva Freeport, and no government will collect a cent until it leaves the confines of this concrete tax haven. While the Geneva repository is the oldest, other
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in Luxembourg, Monaco, Singapore, Beijing, and Delaware. They are popular with the wealthy and the unscrupulous. In 2016, Italian police pried open crates in the Geneva Freeport that had sat for fifteen years in a vault rented by an offshore company.6 Inside they found a priceless collection of looted Roman and
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treasure troves to house art, antiques, jewelry, watches, and vintage wine for the uberwealthy. Today more than 65 percent of the articles stored in the Geneva Freeport are art and antiques.9 The switch from dry goods to luxury items parallels a behavioral shift in art collecting that accelerated with the emergence
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revealed in the Mossfon files. The largest single collection of Picassos in private hands, outside of the Picasso family, is believed to reside in the Geneva Freeport. The paintings belong to the Nahmad family, Syrian Jews who pioneered the commodification of fine art, buying paintings and holding them in the
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Geneva Freeport until they reached an attractive sales price. The family was also a longtime Mossfon customer, dating back to the days of Antoni Guerrero’s Geneva
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too young to have purchased the painting as claimed by Christie’s.18 After buying the work, the Nahmads tucked the Modigliani away in the Geneva Freeport to appreciate in value. The painting only left their vault twice to be exhibited and once in 2008 for an aborted auction where it failed
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Fine Art Foundation (2017), p. 57, http://1uyxqn3lzdsa2ytyzj1asxmmmpt.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/TEFAF-Art-Market-Report-20173.pdf. 2 the Geneva Freeport, more than 600,000 square feet of storage space: “Ports francs et entrepôts douaniers ouverts,” Contrôle fédéral des finances (CDF), January 28, 2014, p. 34
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/2015/03/TEFAF2015.pdf. 9 Today more than 65 percent of the articles stored in the Geneva Freeport are art and antiques: Geneva Free Ports and Warehouses Limited, “Second Update,” press conference presentation, June 8, 2016, http://geneva-freeports.ch/files/8714/7392/8901/dossier_presse_uk.pdf. 10 76 percent of collectors purchased
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, 61 General Corporation Law, 15 Generalov, Sergey, 82–83 Geneva, 14, 15, 27, 47–59, 84, 93, 106, 130, 136, 142–43, 203, 240, 269 Geneva Freeport, 103–6 Geoghegan, Michael, 54 Germany, 7, 89–91, 153, 155, 160, 178, 195, 220–21, 231, 232 banking, 205–10 BND, 178 Commerzbank raid
Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World
by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope · 17 Sep 2018 · 354pp · 110,570 words
for a major logistics company, except the complex is secured more tightly than any normal warehouse, with iris scanners on the doors. This is the Geneva Freeport, a warehouse for the überelite to stash their possessions—gold bars, bottles of rare wine, and, most recently, art. Freeports have a long history in
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commodities or other goods without incurring local taxes. Authorities were willing to forgo the revenues if it led to more economic activity and investment. The Geneva Freeport, majority-owned by the state of Geneva, started out in the nineteenth century as a tax-free waypoint for grain, timber, and other commodities. Over
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place, and authorities asked few questions about the provenance of the items inside. It was a money launderer’s paradise. Perhaps Low learned about the Geneva Freeport from Al Qubaisi, who had cars there, including a Bugatti Veyron and a Pagani Huayra. In the early phase of his scheme, Low concentrated on
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they sometimes didn’t know the beneficial owner behind anonymous shell companies that bought Monets or Rothkos. While Swiss bank secrecy had been eroded, the Geneva Freeport did not have to list its clients. A Swiss art warehouse owner called Yves Bouvier, who was involved in the
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Geneva Freeport, in 2010 opened a similar fortress for the rich in Singapore, near Changi airport. The New York Times dubbed these entrepôts the “Cayman Islands of
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art world.” Occasionally there was a chink in the armor of secrecy, like in 2013, when Swiss customs officers on a routine inspection of the Geneva Freeport impounded nine artifacts looted from Libya, Syria, and Yemen, ranging from Roman-era bas-reliefs to Greek statues. But for Low, the art world, and
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Lichtenstein, Picasso, and Warhol, and by the end of the year he possessed art worth an estimated $330 million. He stashed it all in the Geneva Freeport and then set about covering up the evidence of how it had been financed. To do that, Low wrote a series of letters—supposedly from
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cheaper Mark Ryden work—but no one could enjoy these testaments to human creativity; they were locked away in the humidity-controlled vaults of the Geneva Freeport. Now, Low had hundreds of millions of dollars in a very safe place. But there was one asset even more transportable than art: jewelry. To
The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money
by Frederik Obermaier · 17 Jun 2016 · 372pp · 109,536 words
ownership. Research is so easy sometimes! Both documents name International Art Center as the owner and state that the painting is in storage at the Geneva Freeport, where works owned by the Nahmads are also stored. A long article published in the Wall Street Journal in October 2014 helps us understand the
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countries. The authorities search UEFA’s offices and its marketing agency in Switzerland, Amedeo Modigliani’s Seated Man with a Cane is seized at the Geneva Freeport, and officials search the Mossack Fonseca offices in El Salvador and Peru. Then, finally, police raid the Mossack Fonseca headquarters in Panama. Investigators work through