Patrick Drahi, the billionaire founder of telecoms group Altice, has agreed to buy famed auction house Sotheby’s in a $3.7bn deal including debt that will return the company to private ownership after 31 years.
The transaction will see Mr Drahi’s BidFair holding company pay $57 per share to acquire all of Sotheby’s common stock, a 61 per cent premium to its most recent closing price.
The takeover by the Franco-Israeli entrepreneur will mean the world’s two largest auction houses are both in the private hands of French billionaires. Two decades ago Sotheby’s arch rival Christie’s was bought by Artemis, the holding company of France’s Pinault family, for $1.2bn.
Sotheby’s and Christie’s have had a spree of record-breaking art auctions over the past two years, as the art market recovered from a lull that coincided with a broad downturn in financial markets. The resurgence of the art market was cemented with the $450m sale of a contested Leonardo da Vinci painting in 2017. After that, records have been set with multimillion-dollar sales of works by David Hockney, Claude Monet and Jeff Koons.
While Christie’s was out of public glare, Sotheby’s was thrown into turmoil multiple times by activist interventions. The group attracted a blistering public attack from hedge fund managers Dan Loeb and Mick McGuire, with the latter accusing it of “wilful neglect” in 2015. (more…)
