Legal Cases

THE Chicago Clearing Company, the US firm trading in auction house class action certificates, will be in London again this week.

THE Venini factory of Venice are to meet with their lawyers this week to discuss stepping up legal action against the family of Italian glass designer Fulvio Bianconi.

CHRISTIE’S have won leave to appeal against the High Court judgment that found them liable to pay damages to Taylor Lynne Thomson in the dispute over the £1.75m Houghton urns.

THE High Court has barred the former directors of now-bankrupt Interactive Collector Ltd from serving as directors of any British company for a period of seven years.

LAST week’s High Court judgement on the dispute over the gilded urns sold by Christie’s to Taylor Lynne Thomson should not prompt any dramatic changes to traditional cataloguing practice.

APPEAL Court judges have lifted the punishment given to a London dealer convicted of handling £1.5m worth of stolen silver after hearing how he had committed the crimes in order to pay for his wife’s cancer treatment.

FURTHER delays look likely before those promised redress following the Sotheby’s and Christie’s price fixing settlement receive compensation.

A HIGH Court judge has retired to consider his ruling in a case that could revolutionise the terms under which auctioneers do business.

PARIS auctioneer Jean-Claude Binoche has been given an eight-month suspended jail sentence, and fined €100,000, after a Paris court found him guilty of fraud.

INITIAL arguments in the £1.75m High Court dispute between Christie’s and Taylor Lynne Thomson over a pair of porphyry urns indicate that both parties intend to fight their corner vigorously.

Paris auctioneer Jean-Claude Binoche has been charged with fraud in connection with the sale of three pictures in 1995. Binoche, 61, is accused of buying two works himself at an auction he staged on 18 October 1995, which is illegal under French law, and of selling another work after the sale (a Prud’hon drawing, to the Beaux-Arts museum in Dijon). After-sales were illegal in France at the time, although they have been permitted since 2001.

ARTS Minister Estelle Morris will hold a seminar for the trade on the new UK measures to restrict the illicit trade in cultural objects. Slated for January 15 in the BP Lecture Theatre, at the Clore Education Centre of the British Museum, the session will see Miss Morris give a presentation on the UK implementation of the 1970 UNESCO Convention, the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003 and the new Money Laundering Regulations.

AUCTIONEERS may be forced to change the way they catalogue objects if a High Court ruling goes against them next year.

THE Chicago Clearing Corporation, the US traders in class action certificates, are to visit London again to buy and sell the vouchers issued following the Christie’s/Sotheby’s collusion case settlement.

Representatives of a US company trading in class action certificates are coming to London to meet UK recipients of vouchers relating to the Sotheby’s/Christie’s price-fixing settlement in the USA.

THE company appointed to administer the Sotheby’s/Christie’s price fixing settlement in Europe have apologised for the error on the compensation claim forms which has delayed the process. The Garden City Group, who sent out the forms last month, transcribed the compensation amounts in dollars rather than pounds sterling. The amounts were listed in the section of the form titled Pre-Printed Transactions Supplied by Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

A BASIC clerical error seems certain to delay compensation payments linked to the Sotheby’s/Christie’s price fixing settlement, it has emerged. At least in some cases, the figures quoted in forms sent out notifying claimants of their entitlements have been transcribed in dollars rather than in sterling.

A federal judge has ordered dotcom giant eBay Inc. to pay $29m (£18.3m) to a Virginia inventor who accused the company of stealing his ideas for holding and searching online auctions. Ruling in Virginia on August 6, US District Court Judge Jerome Friedman said there was “no dispute” that the online auction site eBay had infringed patents which covered ways for people to make online bids backed by credit cards and purchase items over the Internet for a fixed price.

A Massachusetts auction house is being sued for breach of contract and malpractice after a Chinese vase it sold for $23,000 returned to auction six months later at Christie’s Hong Kong where it brought $1.55m.

S.J. Shrubsole, the well-known silver dealership of New York, have pleaded guilty to failing to collect around $75,000 in city and state sales taxes on over $900,000 worth of goods. The gallery also pleaded guilty to falsifying tax returns filed with the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. They have now paid $150,000 in fines relating to the plea.