He’s pursued Gulbenkian ever since the failed deal, saying that negotiating with the broker was like “dealing with someone escaping, always telling lies, fabricating emails, trying to make me believe something that doesn’t exist. It’s all a pile of lies. You’re going after a mirage.”
The 179-pound Kusama pumpkin was destined for Thailand, with the billionaire Chirathivat family set to be the ultimate buyer, Ticolat said. The sculpture, which he thought was initially undervalued, could now be worth as much as $5 million, he estimated.
Angela Maria Ischwang—her birth name—moved to London from Germany in the early 2000s and in 2010 married Duarte Gulbenkian, a soccer agent and Calouste’s great-grandnephew.
With the pumpkin deal, Gulbenkian had the “best and honest intentions,” Groome said. But when the money arrived in her account, “the temptation was just too great.”
She thought she was “wrongfully borrowing the money with a clear hope and desire that she would be able to repay it,” her lawyer said.
The judge said he accepted that the activity was “not fraudulent from the outset.”
Gulbenkian has been held in prison since December 2020 after her arrest in Lisbon.
In a linked but separate civil case filed by Ticolat, Gulbenkian produced an email that she said was from the work’s owner, former Volkswagen AG chief Martin Winterkorn, that exonerated her. But prosecutors said the document was a forgery. “It was an elaborate false story,” the lawyer David Markham said.
Winterkorn’s lawyer previously said that he didn’t know Gulbenkian and never owned the sculpture.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.