Word: bond
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...market was going like the Wabash Cannon Ball through 1988 and 1989, Bond's own finances were not. His bid for Irises had been part of a consistent pattern: paying far too much for investments even though they were, as assets, sound. In 1987 he paid more than $700 million for Kerry Packer's TV stations in Australia. In the financial year ending last June, Bond's media firm posted a $34 million loss. Also in 1987, Bond paid more than $1 billion for the U.S. brewery G. Heileman, whose 1989 resale value is about half that...
...Bond was trying to shift more than $9 billion in debt. When payment on Sotheby's bridging loan of $27 million fell due, he could not meet it, and Sotheby's rolled it over for another year...
Meanwhile, rumors about Bond's delay in paying up were spreading through financial circles. Last January an Australian finance company approached an auction house in London with the utterly novel idea of packaging an option on Irises, in the event that Dallhold Investments -- the holding company through which Bond owned the picture -- defaulted. The auction house rejected this proposal. In late 1988 Bond himself reportedly tried to pass off Irises to the New York megadeveloper Donald Trump as partial payment on a $180 million deal for the St. Moritz Hotel. Trump, no collector, said the painting was worth only...
Early in 1989 Bond arranged to send the Van Gogh and five minor impressionist paintings he owned, packaged as "Irises and Five Masterpieces," on a tour of Australian museums, finishing at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. Irises was set in a double-glazed frame that ensured no one could touch or even closely inspect its surface -- which made some skeptical Aussies suspect it was an exact copy commissioned, for security reasons, by Sotheby...
...arose. Sotheby's suggested to the Art Gallery that Irises might remain on view there for some weeks after the exhibition ended. The trustees of the museum wanted to be sure they would not be held liable for possible damage to Irises; there had already been demonstrations outside, protesting Bond's investments in Chile. The trustees called in government lawyers to check on the insurance of the Van Gogh...