Billionaires blocking the auction block

I see that Bloomberg is reporting that casino billionaire Stanley Ho has just paid a record HK$69.1 million ($8.9 million/£4.4m) for a Qing Dynasty bronze horse's head (left) in order to prevent it coming up for auction at Sotheby's. The head is one of 12 zodiac animals from a water-clock fountain in Yuanmingyuan, the imperial summer palace that was set ablaze and its treasures looted by British and French troops in October 1860.

There is a trend emerging here. Back in 2004, Russian oligarch Victor Vekselberg repatriated the entire Forbes collection of Fabergé imperial eggs (story here) valued at about $90m which Sotheby's had been planning to auction.

Last week, Alisher Usmanov, the 18th richest man in Russia, roadblocked yet another Sotheby's sale — that of the collection of Russian paintings and decorative arts assembled by the late Russian cello maestro Mstislav Rostropovich, paying over £25 million to secure the treasures for his homeland. Usmanov recently bought a 15% (£75m) stake in Arsenal football club.

Meanwhile Nigerians continue to look back to the looting of Benin in 1897 when their own cultural heritage was ransacked and dispersed by the British Punitive Expedition at subsequent auctions in London and Paris. Today, many of these artefacts are on display in Chicago, U.S.A. where they are kicking up a storm of controversy (full story here).

With regard to Usmanov's recent art spend (and hardly comparable, I grant you), I note hapless Russian striker Andrei Shevchenko cost his Chelsea boss Roman Abramovich no less than Euro45 million (£34.5m) when he signed from AC Milan. Perhaps it's time to repatriate that piece of cultural heritage too.