The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG) has officially dismissed the criminal case against Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev and his lawyer, Tetiana Bersheda, which was part of a long-running legal dispute with Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier.
The case, initiated in 2017, was dismissed due to a lack of admissible evidence following a key ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in June 2024, as well as the withdrawal of Bouvier’s complaint.
Rybolovlev, who owns AS Monaco football club, had accused Bouvier of swindling him out of €1.1 billion from the sale of 38 artworks, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, between 2003 and 2014. Rybolovlev claimed that Bouvier, acting as his agent, had inflated prices and pocketed exorbitant margins. Bouvier, however, maintained that he had acted as an independent dealer and was free to set his own profit margins. Their decade-long legal battle, which spanned multiple jurisdictions from Monaco to Hong Kong, finally came to an end in December 2023 when the pair reached an out-of-court settlement covering all their disputes.
Despite this settlement, other complaints persisted, including one filed by a close associate of Bouvier, who accused Bersheda of transmitting a recorded conversation to investigators without his knowledge. As part of this investigation, Bersheda handed over her mobile phone to prove the recording had not been tampered with. However, thousands of deleted messages were recovered from her phone by order of a Monaco-based investigating judge, Edouard Levrault, which prosecutors alleged showed Rybolovlev using his connections in Monaco to frame Bouvier.
Rybolovlev and Bersheda’s defense contested these accusations at every judicial level, eventually taking the matter to the ECHR. In June 2024, the ECHR ruled that the recovery of the mobile data was a violation of attorney-client privilege and constituted an unlawful search. This decision rendered the phone data inadmissible in court, leading the OAG to conclude that there was no longer any credible evidence to support Bouvier’s accusations. “Following the withdrawal of the criminal complaint and the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, the evidence on which the criminal complaint was based cannot be used in the present procedure,” the OAG concluded in its order, sent to Monaco Life by Rybolovlev’s lawyers,
Rybolovlev’s legal team welcomed the move, saying in a statement provided to Monaco Life,”We are pleased with this decision, through which the Swiss judiciary has definitively closed the case and confirmed our client’s innocence, which he has steadfastly maintained.” They added that the dismissal was consistent with the ECHR ruling, which determined that the evidence obtained from Bersheda’s phone could not be used against Rybolovlev.
This dismissal brings closure to yet another chapter in the legal saga between Rybolovlev and Bouvier. While the core dispute over the art sales was settled in late 2023, this recent decision from the Swiss courts effectively closes the remaining criminal proceedings.
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Photo source: AFP