Word: bonde
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Criticism of auction-house guarantees and loans has been particularly widespread in the past few weeks, ever since it was disclosed that Sotheby's had lent Australian entrepreneur Alan Bond $27 million in 1987 to buy what became the most expensive painting of all time, Van Gogh's Irises. But Sotheby's defends its policy as right, proper and indeed inevitable. Guarantees are given "very sparingly," CEO Ainslie said last week. "It is unusual for more than one or two paintings in a sale to be guaranteed." Ainslie rejects any comparison to margin trading. "We do not make...
...that "if an auctioneer makes loans or advances money to consignors and/or prospective purchasers, this fact must be conspicuously disclosed in the auctioneer's catalog." But did this mean that Sotheby's put a note in the catalog of its November 1987 sale saying it had given one Alan Bond a loan of half the hammer price, repayment terms to be negotiated, on Irises? Think again...
...catalog that it offers financial services, but I'd like to see disclosure of the entire commitment. I would like to know if it is part owner of a painting, and if it has a fiduciary interest, I want to know what it is. If it lends Bond $27 million, I want that fact in the catalog...
...late 1987 the name of Alan Bond was riding very high in America, and in Australia he was a hero. "Bondy," as his country called him, was the prime mover in the syndicate that funded the design, construction and testing of Australia II, the 12-meter sloop with the controversial winged keel that swept to victory over the U.S. defender off Newport in 1983, leaving, for the first time in yachting history, an empty plinth in the New York Yacht Club where the America's Cup used to stand...
...high school dropout who emigrated from England as a boy, Bond had come up the hard way, fueled by an insatiable drive to acquire, combine, take over. At 49 he was one of the richest men in Australia. He controlled an empire of assets under the umbrella of his holding company, Bond Corporation Holdings Ltd.: television stations, retailing, minerals and breweries around the world. He had even figured out a way of selling nonalcoholic beer to Muslims in the Middle East. Everything about him was on a large scale -- his ambitions, his capacity for risk, his appetite for publicity. Also...