The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World
by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian · 7 Oct 2024 · 336pp · 104,899 words
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. * * * • • • Yves Bouvier, once known to the world as the “freeport king,” is a thin man with graying blond hair, blue eyes, a wicked smile, and the tweaky
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, the forty thieves at least made visits to admire their treasure. At the freeport, artworks are lonely, trapped in bespoke crates under lock and key. Yves Bouvier did not exactly reinvent the freeport, but he did rebrand it. He knew, from living in Geneva, what the rich want: technology, exclusivity, walls, doors
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a world where the big fish eat small fish, and the small fish eat shrimps, Singapore must become a poisonous shrimp.” Singapore was hungry, and Yves Bouvier’s warehouse—and the art “hub” he promised would come with it—was live bait. With cash to invest and an expanding client list, Bouvier
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resemble some of the more questionable activities long found in Luxembourg’s offshore financial center.” At the peak of his career in the art world, Yves Bouvier had positioned himself at the dead center of this glitzy new offshore world: between Geneva, Singapore, and Luxembourg, he’d created a network of states
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not resist making one exception: to attend a reading at a Geneva bookstore by a Swiss journalist named Antoine Harari, who had been reporting on Yves Bouvier’s feud since 2019. It was there that I first encountered Bouvier in the flesh. Practically dizzy from the novelty of an outing, I took
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, a blue mock-turtleneck sweater, a blue cashmere scarf, and On Cloud sneakers: the weekday uniform of the moderately but not obscenely rich. It was Yves Bouvier. And he had comments, not questions. “I got him four Modiglianis. There are ten in the world. Two are held by foundations and aren’t
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yellow towers that, in the afternoon light, resembled twin gold bars reaching for the sky. I must have passed the Luxembourg freeport, then still under Yves Bouvier’s management, as well, but it was largely hidden from view. This was by design. The anthropologist Samuel Weeks recalls being met with a “blank
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works satirized the Luxembourg freeport. In that play, an actor playing its director, David Arendt, asserted that “Money laundering is cultural heritage here!”—to which Yves Bouvier’s character answered, “That is clear, as a Swiss I know my colleagues,” before demanding changes to the country’s tax laws. The collective’s
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was Boten’s most peculiar quality. Special economic zones have always traded in the fictions of space and time—recall the indefinitely transitory status of Yves Bouvier’s freeport Rothkos, and of indefinite tax “holidays” in offshore factories (Marx might have dubbed this “the annihilation of time by space”). But rarely do
Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century
by Georgina Adam · 14 Jun 2014 · 231pp · 60,546 words
of the importance of the art market for these freeports is that they regularly take booths in the major art fairs to promote their services. Yves Bouvier, the Swiss entrepreneur who is a major shareholder in the Luxembourg, Geneva and Singapore ports, denies that they are used for anything illegitimate. ‘They are
The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy
by Frank Vogl · 14 Jul 2021 · 265pp · 80,510 words
oligarch Dmitry Rybolovelev reputedly owns a vast art collection, which came to light when in 2015 he sued his former art advisor and art dealer Yves Bouvier, who owned warehouses in Monte Carlo and outside of Geneva, both of which are designated duty-free zones. He alleged that he had been overcharged
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
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 Geneva Freeport, in 2010 opened a similar fortress for the rich in Singapore, near Changi airport. The New York Times