From The Times, November 23:
A former Mayfair art dealer faces up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to conning art buyers out of more than $86 million.
Inigo Philbrick, 34, fled to the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu after his elaborate scams, which involved selling the same art works to different investors, began to unravel.
When asked by the judge why he did it, Philbrick said: “For the money, your honour.”
He entered the art scene more than a decade ago, rising up the ranks at the White Cube gallery in London, where he started as an intern, and going on to run two galleries in London and Miami, specialising in postwar and contemporary fine art.
The Connecticut-born son of an art museum curator pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud charges in a New York criminal court after prosecutors said he conducted an elaborate scam from 2016 to 2019 to finance his art business.
He was accused of selling the same art works to multiple investors at inflated prices to get the money to pay for another. In 2019 he is said to have resold an artwork for $5.5 million (£4.1 million) only for one person to claim they held 100 per cent of it and two others 50 per cent each, according to The Sunday Telegraph.
Prosecutors told a court last week how Philbrick misrepresented the ownership of certain artworks and sometimes sold more than 100 per cent ownership to multiple people and entities without their knowledge.
Artworks used in the scam included, among others, a 1982 painting by the Jean-Michel Basquiat titled Humidity, a 2010 untitled painting by Christopher Wool and an untitled 2012 painting by Rudolf Stingel depicting Pablo Picasso.
The scam unraveled as jilted art buyers filed civil lawsuits, a lender notified him that he was in default of a $14 million loan and he stopped responding to the legal process, prosecutors said. In November 2019 Philbrick failed to appear for court hearings in Miami and London. His whereabouts were unknown, even by his partner at the time, the Made in Chelsea reality TV star Victoria Baker-Harber, with whom he has a young daughter. He was eventually arrested by the FBI in Vanuatu last year and extradited back to the US....
....MUCH MORE
Previously:
April 2020
"Inigo Philbrick is a Ponzi-scheming gallerist who got in over his head. Now he’s gone missing—with a pack of furious collectors on his trail"
