Nearly a decade after becoming entangled in a legal battle over multimillion-dollar art deals, Russian billionaire and collector Dmitry Rybolovlev has successfully fought to have all criminal charges against him dismissed.
Attorneys for Rybolovlev announced that an appeals court in Monaco has annulled criminal proceedings initiated in 2017 against Rybolovlev and his then attorney Tetiana Bersheda. The court ruled the case was “irreparably flawed” due to evidence that was “illegally” extracted from Bersheda’s phone during a separate investigation involving Rybolovlev and Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier.
“In its unanimous ruling, the Court found that the extraction and use of Ms. Bersheda’s phone were in violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to private life,” the statement from Rybolovlev’s attorney reads. Charges against Bersheda were also annulled.
The news comes roughly four months after the Swiss Federal Prosecutor’s office said it had dismissed its criminal investigation into Rybolovlev. His attorneys called the news “welcome,” albeit “expected” in a statement issued at the time.
In September 2017, the French press dubbed the scandal “Monaco-gate” after Le Monde published text messages showing Philippe Narmino, then Monaco’s minister of justice, had worked to influence Rybolovlev’s billion-dollar art fraud case against Bouvier. The French newspaper suggested “a vast influence-peddling scandal” was at the heart of Monégasque institutions. Narmino resigned following the revelations, reportedly to take “early retirement.”
According to reports, hundreds of text messages exchanged between Rybolovlev, Bersheda, and Narmino included information about an all-expenses-paid ski trip for Narmino and his wife at the billionaire’s Swiss chalet in Gstaad, as well as a private helicopter ride and other pricey gifts.
The messages also reportedly suggested Bersheda was in close contact with the Monaco police about a plan to arrest Bouvier after “luring” him to Monaco. The dealer was arrested there in early 2015 following the allegations by Rybolovlev and then released on bail for €10 million ($10.8 million).
The dramatic legal battle between Bouvier and Rybolovlev—which played out in jurisdictions across the world, including New York, Singapore, and Geneva— finally ended in late 2023 with a confidential settlement between the two.
However, that didn’t stop Rybolovelev from pursuing auction house Sotheby’s for aiding and abetting fraud in a New York court in January 2024 with a trial that lasted nearly a month. The collector alleged that the auction house had conspired with Bouvier to sell four works by Leonardo da Vinci, Gustav Klimt, René Magritte, and Amedeo Modigliani to him at inflated prices. Bouvier was not a defendant in the case.
After three weeks of incredibly detailed testimony, a jury cleared Sotheby’s of any wrongdoing.
With the latest news out of Monaco, is the saga finally over? “This criminal proceeding was the last one pending against Dmitry Rybolovlev and Tetiana Bersheda in Monaco, where he was cleared of the charges in November 2023 and she was acquitted in March 2024,” Rybolovlev’s lawyers said. “Therefore there are no longer any open criminal proceedings… They are totally and definitively cleared.”