Advisers Lock Horns in Yves Bouvier Art Fraud Battle

As the legal battle between the disgraced art transporter Yves Bouvier and the Rybolovlev Family Trust continues, a group of colourful advisers is attempting to shape the case behind the scenes.

Despite his financial troubles, Bouvier still has enough of his loot stashed away to be able to afford some of the most expensive legal minds money can buy.

Many of them are high profile and genuinely big names in the jurisdictions where Bouvier finds himself facing serious criminal charges. Not surpisingly, nearly all of Bouvier’s current team made their big names helping other clients of dubious reputation defend themselves against similarly grave accusations.

So that of course makes them perfectly suited to try to help the stricken Bouvier. And, if they can’t do that, at least they can separate him from some of his [allegedly!] ill-gotten gains.

Interestingly, despite the arguably more storied resumes of his legal team, it is Bouvier’s relatively new PR man, Marc Comina, whose chequered past really catches the eye.

Brought in to try and shake up a lifeless PR effort, Comina is trying his best to defend the indefensible. He obviously has very little ammunition to do so but is trying to make the best of a bad situation.

A former political journalist, Comina is also a failed politician, having run unsuccessfully for office in and around Lausanne.

He then moved from journalism to the “darkside”, casting aside the trusty sword of truth to take the coin of anyone willing to pay for his PR services. A period at Swiss shop Farner Consulting was followed by a decision to set up on his own: and that is when the really unsavoury clients began to appear.

The most high profile of Comina’s dodgy clients has been Viktor Khrapunov, a former Minister of Energy of Kazakhstan and one time Mayor of Almaty who was accused of siphoning off millions to family members before he fled to Switzerland. Comina has been working day and night to persuade the press that – against all the evidence – Khrapunov is just a misunderstood, completely innocent man. Does that PR line sound familiar?

In fact, Comina got himself so embroiled in the machinations around Kazakhstan that he was also involved in the infamous case of Christa Markwalder who was tricked in a cunning e-mail ploy in a major lobbying scandal.

By comparison, the careers of the legal advisers are more pedestrian. But the type of advisers Bouvier is surrounding himself with is still revealing.

Take the great French lawyer Francis Szpiner. Here is a man who thrives on the misery of others. He made his reputation defending many of the high profile people caught up in France’s political-financial scandals of the 1990s and 2000s. Most famous of these was of course Alain Juppe, the former French Prime Minister. Still, despite his big payday on the case, Szpiner’s skills of sophistry weren’t enough to save Juppe, who was convicted of corruption in a scheme to create phony City Hall jobs. Szpiner’s client was given a suspended prison sentence and banned from public life for 10 years.

From the elite level to the more base, the lawyer representing Bouvier’s co-defendant Tania Rappo recently got himself into some pretty serious personal trouble. Frank Michel thought nothing of getting behind the wheel of his car after quite a few drinks and ended up injuring an unfortunate woman pedestrian. He was convicted by a court in Monaco of the drink-driving offence.

Other Bouvier lawyers, such as David Bitton of Monfrini, Crettol & Associates try to keep a lower profile. However, it is no surprise that the firm’s website gives Bitton’s speciality as the following: “business crime”

So Bouvier has a quite incredible cast of characters on his payroll right now, but what about the other side of the case?

The Rybolovlev Family Trust team seems quite straight-laced by comparison. Heading up the legal team is an accomplished young lawyer, Tetiana Bersheda, who was born in Kiev, Ukraine, but grew up in Switzerland. Bersheda has become a close adviser to Rybolovlev over the years and won a major victory earlier in 2015 when a divorce settlement of around $4 billion was reduced to around $600 million.

Bersheda, who now splits her time between Geneva and Monaco, also has quite an impressive cultural hinterland. A devotee of ballet since her youth, Bersheda is now the President of the Friends of the Ballet of Monte Carlo, a prestigious position on the arts scene in the Principality.

Other prominent members of the Rybolovlev Family Trust team include Sacha Mandel, the former communications adviser to French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian and previously a senior executive at French marketing giant Euro RSG.

In Switzerland, Mr Bouvier’s home turf, Claude Olivier-Rochat, a veteran Swiss PR adviser, leads the Trust’s team.

So, two contrasting teams of advisers face off against each other. What will the next chapter bring? Nobody can say for sure. Only one thing is certain – this saga has a way to run yet.