Word: australian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like many another entrepreneur, Bond had never given much thought to art until he got rich. "This Pie-casso, now," he asked an Australian museum man over dinner in Sydney in the early 1980s, "is he worth having?" But a major impressionist collection was what Bond hankered after. He knew this could not possibly come cheap. He didn't care. He was, in short, a dealer's dream: Billionaris ignorans, a species now almost extinct in the U.S. but preserved (along with other ancient life-forms) in the Antipodes...
Bond arranged with the financial services division of Sotheby's for an open- ended bridging loan of half the hammer price, whatever that would be. The other half he borrowed from an Australian bank...
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...
...Christie's in 1983 for $3.96 million and transferred ownership to the Sydney branch of Chemical Bank. Chemical then leased it back to Bond. Why this maneuver? Because, says a bank source who analyzed the lease after it was issued, Bond had found a tax loophole. Under Australian tax law, you could lease any asset -- say, a tractor -- from its owner and get a tax deduction for all payments of principal and interest, as long as you had no right to the asset at the end of the term. (The law, needless to say, was framed to help undercapitalized businesses...