The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  This was to seriously misread Dimitri Papadimitriou. He called de Walden in London. From now on, he said, it was war.

  De Walden was ready. Just four days after Deppy received her court papers in Athens, he obtained an ex parte injunction in London to raid all Symes’s premises and freeze his assets. The next day, Wednesday, February 28, 2001, at 11:30 in the morning, while Symes was in Geneva, solicitors acting under de Walden’s leadership simultaneously broke into five of Symes’s premises, changed the locks, and seized all documentation. As part of the same injunction, Symes was now not allowed to trade without permission of the court and his bank accounts were also frozen.

  As an aggressive and successful shipowner, Dimitri Papadimitriou relishes a good scrap, and in being rich, he was able to attack his opponent in ways less well-heeled litigants could only dream of. After their successful maneuver in freezing Symes’s assets and bank accounts, the next move was to have Symes followed. This was wildly expensive (the legal costs in this case amounted in the end to around $16 million). But, for Papadimitriou, the money was well spent. Using an organization run from Brighton by an ex-Scotland Yard detective, Symes was followed in no fewer than six countries—Switzerland, Britain, Germany, Italy, the United States, and Japan. The effort engaged up to fifty people and at times involved highly unorthodox methods. When Symes attended a conference in Geneva, the men following him posed as police allegedly searching for illegal immigrants; on another occasion, they pretended to be firemen; in a third case, they searched his hotel room disguised as cleaning women.

  But, says de Walden, it paid off. “We discovered that Symes stored his antiquities not at five sites but at thirty-three. The number of objects comprising the stock of the business has snowballed to 17,000, with a value, according to stock lists, of £125 million.”

  Symes denies any suggestion that he has been hiding his assets. “They are my assets, no one else’s. The question of ‘hiding’ doesn’t arise.”

  But Papadimitriou’s campaign didn’t stop at surveillance. Private detectives staking out Symes’s premises at Ormond Yard observed his staff disposing of several garbage bags containing shredded documents. The detectives helped themselves to the bags—twenty-three in all—which were locked away at Lane and Partners.

  Symes dismisses this as scaremongering: “It was routine shredding.” But Dimitri Papadimitriou and de Walden went so far as to obtain an estimate from a firm in Birmingham, England, which said it would cost £350,000 ($500,000) to reconstruct that amount of shredded paperwork. Even Papadimitriou balked at this price, but in sifting through the paper strips, de Walden noticed some that had come from a bright yellow American legal pad. Aided by this color code, he was able to reconstruct a single sheet of paper. And he struck it rich. The document was an aide-mémoire handwritten by Symes, accepting that Christo’s family had given much financial help to the business in “funding many purchases and in guarantees for bank loans.” In the most revealing sentence, the aide-mémoire referred to Despina Papadimitriou as a silent partner.

  Although the surveillance reports make gripping reading, Symes was also photographed, dining in restaurants across Switzerland. His companions were often identified from their vehicle registration numbers, or they were followed home and identified from their addresses. This surveillance showed that Symes was regularly meeting people involved in the antiquities trade, and it convinced Papadimitriou and de Walden that Symes had assets they still didn’t know about and that he was continuing to trade. On one occasion Symes was followed all the way to Japan, where he visited the Miho Museum, well known to archaeologists for its acquisitions of controversial (unprovenanced) antiquities (see Chapter 20). Symes was also followed when he was driven from Geneva to Venice, where he left a box with an acquaintance.

  Symes is appalled by what he sees as a gross infringement of his privacy and insists he was doing nothing wrong. He was outside the jurisdiction of the British courts and pursuing his legitimate business interests.

  As each new address of Symes was discovered, however, de Walden applied to the court to force him to reveal the contents. There were nearly thirty “interlocutory” hearings, and eventually Dimitri Papadimitriou’s campaign began to pay off. Partway through 2002, the judge in the case, Justice Peter Smith, so lost patience with Symes, and what he saw as his delaying tactics in revealing all his warehouses, that he changed the burden of proof in the case. Instead of the Greeks having to prove that there was a partnership, Symes would now have to prove there was not. Partly as a result of this, in January the following year Symes dramatically changed tack. In Greece, on the eve of the trial in his own lawsuit, he dropped his action. In London, he performed what the judge later described as a “remarkable somersault” in his defense. He obtained permission to abandon his suggestion that Christo was a mere employee. Now he reverted to the view he had really held all along, that he and Christo were partners in the husband-and-wife sense and that, at Christo’s death, the entire assets of their partnership, including the house in Seymour Walk, the house on Schinnoussa, their cars and boats, passed to Symes by survivorship.

  This incensed the Papadimitrious even further. Whatever fond feelings they retained for Symes (and Deppy retained some, she said), they had no intention of letting him get his hands on their yachts, still less Schinnoussa.

  However, though he had allowed the “remarkable somersault” in Symes’s defense, the judge was in no mood to allow him much more leeway. The trial was set for June 2003.

  It never happened. At the time he had allowed Symes to amend his defense, the judge had set a deadline of March 31, 2003, for him to disclose all the documents on which he based his new arguments. Symes failed to comply. The reason, he said, was that he ran out of lawyers. He had chopped and changed solicitors quite a bit, and due to the requirement to clear all his business transactions with the court, he wasn’t always as flush with funds as he might otherwise have been. The judge was not convinced by this, again lost patience with Symes, and due to this latest noncompliance, threw out his amended defense.

  This meant that the Papadimitrious had won. So far as the court was concerned, there was a partnership and the family was entitled to half the assets of Symes’s business, as they had always maintained.

  In the immediate aftermath, things got quickly worse for Symes. Following the original raids and the freezing of his assets, he had applied to the court to be able to carry on his business, so that he could live and pay his legal costs. The judge allowed this, provided Symes agreed to sell only with the permission of the court, that he agreed not to remove any “relevant chattel” from his premises without the court’s permission, and that he agreed to sell objects only for “full consideration.”

  It had come to de Walden’s notice, however, that one particular antiquity, a Granodiorite Egyptian statue of Apollo, which Symes said he sold in April 2002 to an American company, Philos, with offices in Cheyenne, Wyoming, had in fact not been sold to that company at all, which had a fictitious address. Further inquiries revealed that Symes had also lied about the price. Instead of being sold to Philos, for $1.6 million, the statue had gone to a certain Sheikh Saoud Al-Thani, in the Gulf Emirates, for $4.5 million.

  For the third time in the case, the judge hit the roof. If this were true, he said, it appeared to him that Symes had committed a contempt of court and he ordered a trial in which the full circumstances of the sale of the statue would be explored. But this was a very different trial from the original case. So far, the whole business had been a matter of commercial litigation, a civil matter. Now, Symes had crossed the line and had possibly committed fraud, a criminal offense. If convicted, he could face jail.

  Before the matter came to court, Symes suffered a further indignity. Eversheds, one of the seven British lawyers he had used, but not paid, finally lost patience with him and, on March 27, 2003, made him bankrupt. This meant that in addition to losing his house and full control of his business, he could now no longer be a direc
tor of any company, even his own. Then, two months later, in May 2003, Leon Levy, the American collector who had been supporting him financially, died. Symes’s world was closing down around him.

  Symes’s defense in the contempt case was that the Granodiorite statue had indeed been sold to the sheikh for $4.5 million but that he only had one-third interest in it, which he had forgotten to mention, and that the other two-thirds were held by dealers in Switzerland, Jean Domercq and Frida Tchacos-Nussberger. Although Mr. Domercq and Mrs. Tchacos-Nussberger were joint defendants in this action, neither appeared in court to defend themselves, though a Swiss lawyer representing both did appear. The court found against the defendants and concluded that Symes owned the statue in its entirety. He was adjudged to have misled the court, to have broken the conditions of the “interlocutory regime,” which forbade him to trade without the knowledge or the permission of the court, and, in July 2004, he was given a one-year suspended jail sentence. What had begun as civil litigation had resulted in something far worse.

  The original action continued. The Greek relatives of Christo were still not convinced that Symes had disclosed all the assets of the business that the two partners had owned. In the course of further researches, they found that Symes appeared to have lied to the court about two other sets of objects. One was the set of art deco furniture by the designer Eileen Gray, and the second was a statue of Akhenaten. The Eileen Gray furniture, Symes said, had been sold to a Parisian dealer for $4 million. Lane and Partners eventually traced this sale and found that Symes had actually sold it for $14 million, with most of the money being lodged in a bank in Gibraltar. The statue of Akhenaten, which Symes said he had sold for $3.6 million, had in fact been sold for nearer $8 million, again to Sheikh Al-Thani, with the money this time being lodged in a bank in Liechtenstein. These sums were located, and recovered.

  While Lane and Partners had been pursuing these investigations, Symes had tried to forestall further court proceedings by claiming, extraordinarily, in the autumn of 2004, that he was mentally incapable of instructing solicitors, and therefore of standing trial. This action failed and Symes was ordered to appear in court again in January 2005.

  Until Christmas he had been living at an inn, in a small village near Basingstoke, about fifty miles west of London. Just before Christmas, however, he moved into the Savoy Hotel in London. Though bankrupt, Symes has a number of friends who still support him financially. When he appeared in court, however, he was unrepresented. He produced a witness statement in which he now admitted that he had lied in court, in relation to both the Eileen Gray furniture and the statue of Akhenaten. The judge took a very severe view of these (now admitted) lies to the court, which involved sums totaling $14 million. In his judgment, Justice Peter Smith concluded that Mr. Symes had committed “a serious and cynical contempt of court,” designed “to conceal that he had deliberately taken the proceeds [and] used them for his own purposes.” He said Symes “has told numerous lies on oath” and repeated “a false story.”

  The judge further said that he was not impressed by Symes’s attempts to suggest that he was confused and muddled by what was going on in court. “The admitted contempts show calculated, cynical and well understood acts of deception.” And he concluded: “Mr. Symes must appreciate that he will not be able, if it is his belief, simply to do his time, get his passport back and leave the jurisdiction. There remains a large number of outstanding questions to be answered. Until those questions are answered and dealt with in a meaningful way the possibility of him obtaining his passport back to enable him to leave the jurisdiction is remote.... I perceive [that it is] a long and necessary road that Mr. Symes still has to go down before this litigation will come to an end.” On January 21, 2005, at the High Court in the Strand in London, Symes was sent to prison on two counts for contempt of court—fifteen months and nine months, to run consecutively, two years in all. He was transferred that day to Pentonville Prison, in North London.

  In the early part of the litigation, the Papadimitriou family had had their lawyers freeze Symes’s assets and seize all his documentation. The lawyers made photocopies of everything, and because they were then hoping to prove that Symes and Christo Michaelides were business partners, not just “husband and wife,” the authors of this book were given a unique opportunity to inspect Symes’s records, so we might see for ourselves that the two men really did manage the business together. In the course of this inspection, we couldn’t help but take note of a number of other matters that, because of our cooperation with the Italian authorities, meant more to us, perhaps, than to the Papadimitrious or their lawyers. The section that follows is based on this access.1

  In his thirty-three warehouses (and not five, as he originally admitted), Symes had 17,000 objects worth an estimated £125 million ($210 million). The average auction sale of antiquities usually numbers somewhere between 400 and 600 lots. There are eight auctions a year, at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Bonhams, in London and New York, making between 3,200 and 4,800 lots sold annually. Between them, in stock, Medici and Symes had some 21,000 objects, or roughly four to five years’ worth of auction supply, if we take these figures at face value. Additionally, Symes’s 17,000 objects were given a collective worth of £125 million, meaning that, on average, “his” antiquities were valued at £7,353. It is notoriously difficult to value antiquities (as the “markups” discussed throughout this book show) and, indeed, when the Papadimitriou lawyers had an independent expert look at some of the Symes objects, she valued them very differently (usually lower). But even if Symes’s estimates on “his” objects were twice what they should have been, that would still have valued them, on average, at £3,677 (say $5,000). This compares with an average price of £600 ($1,000) for antiquities sold at auction.

  Symes had said on several occasions, in his interview with Ferri, that Xoilan Trader, his company that shared an “administrative address” with Editions Services at 7 Avenue Krieg in Geneva, was not a trading company, despite its name, but a holding company for his own collection. This was belied by the marked Sotheby’s catalogs Hodges had leaked to us in the very

  beginning, which showed Xoilan to be selling scores of objects in the sales for which we had inside records. This picture was amplified in the documents and inventory we inspected in London.2 One part of the inventory consisted of 105 pages of lists of objects, with approximately thirty-four items per page, a total of 3,570 artifacts. Xoilan Trader, which accounted for approximately 300 objects, made up nine pages of this list, but elsewhere there were pages and pages of objects dealt in by Xoilan through Sotheby’s. There were also many dealings with Galerie Nefer (Frida Tchacos), and thirty-four numbered transactions with Giacomo Medici. Between 1979 and 1986, Robin Symes Limited, Symes’s other company, conducted at least twenty-nine deals with Medici. The names Getty, Leon Levy, Kimball Museum in Texas, Naji Asfar, Koutoulakis, Savoca, Tempelsman, R. Guy, Orazio Di Simone, Sotheby’s, and Christie’s appeared throughout the inventory, in one context or another.

  Symes’s claims about Xoilan were also flatly contradicted by the copies of marked Sotheby’s catalogs that James Hodges made available to us and by the documents found in Medici’s warehouse. The fact is: When Symes said he didn’t use Xoilan to trade under, he wasn’t telling the truth. For Symes, as Justice Peter Smith discovered and observed, truth is a malleable commodity. Not one of the objects in the inventory we saw was listed with a provenance.

  During the time we were going through the Symes/Michaelides archive, Peter Watson was working on the Greek television investigation referred to earlier (p. 245). The Greek journalists traveled to London and Cambridge to interview, and during their visit the conversation turned to the Symes/Michaelides partnership. Watson mentioned that he had seen several references to Michaelides’ Greek family in the documentation, which did seem to suggest that the Papadimitriou family had a financial interest in the antiquities business. In particular, Watson said, there were six documents that he thought rel
evant.

  The first was a handwritten memo by Symes, which began:While I accept the help given by the family of the late C.M. [Christo Michaelides], both in funding many purchases and in guarantees for bankers, nonetheless I must point out that the business which ran so successfully for many years is now virtually finished; [f]or the reason that international law prohibits the export of w/art [works of art] from most host countries and it is now not possible to fragrantly [flagrantly?] disregard them. Old coll[ectors’]. material does not provide suff[icient]. Funds to cont[inue]. Also there have, unfortunately, been multiple problems arising [from] four pieces which have proved to be either stolen or illegally exported. These losses over the past two years have amounted to considerable sums and have been borne by RS [Robin Symes] Ltd. In many of these instances the family should share the cost and because of their involvement be prepared for further liabilities should they occur. Many pieces were consigned to RS Ltd for sale and the costs involved should therefore the [be?] applicable to the consignors. To date they amount to $7 million and Mrs. Despina Papadimitriou was involved in all of them. Also her sleeping partnership with the firm makes her liable to the J. Paul Getty Museum for the 8 m $ paid for the half share of the limestone figure of Aphrodite should a problem arise with Italian government, who have actively been seeking its return. It is therefore a possibility and a risk I am not prepared to shoulder alone.

  This was interesting on a number of grounds. It dispelled—from the horse’s mouth—the convenient fiction that “old collections” provide much of the material that suddenly appears on the market. It confirmed that Symes had a hand in supplying the Getty with the Aphrodite statue. But it was interesting most of all because it detailed the intimate involvement, the “sleeping partnership,” of the Papadimitriou family—Christo’s sister, Despina, in particular—in financing transactions.