Deborah Orr: A tale of greed and social climbing

'Sir Anthony Tennant would have lent a rich burnish to the auction house trial of trials. Sadly it was not to be'

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Christie's chief lies low after price-fixing trial

Sigourney Weaver has been along to do some research, because she might take a leading role in the movie. Dominick Dunne's been there for the duration, because no high-society trial in the States is complete without the journalist of justice scribing away.

And A Alfred Taubman, the former chairman of Sotheby's, has been found guilty of price-fixing. Taubman until recently was an embodiment of the American dream. He started out as a shoe salesman, fought in Second World War, and then built his fortune – which has at times topped the $1bn mark – from constructing shopping malls. Keen to acquire social cachet, he bought Sotheby's in 1983, and became, with his former beauty queen wife, a big player in the elevated New York social scene. Now, the 76-year-old will have to wait to April to learn what heady mix of $1bn fine and three-year prison term will be concocted as his sentence.

Diana "Dede" Brooks, the once glamorous, respected, $800,000-a-year chief executive of Sotheby's and now chief witness for the prosecution, awaits her custodial sentence too. The former doyenne of the New York art world has in the meantime been teaching deprived children in East Harlem. Surely this should melt the heart of the stoniest hanging judge. Brooks certainly hopes so.

Oh! How the mighty have fallen. Schadenfreude all round! Is there a country in the world that can put on a wheeler-dealer show trial quite as well as the US of A can? I think not.

Britain certainly doesn't offer much in the way of competition. What of the Englishman accused? Sir Anthony Tennant would have lent a rich and welcome burnish to the auction house trial of trials, with his title, his poshness and his old Eton, Cambridge and the Guards credentials. Sadly, it was not to be.

When he was chairman of Christie's, the jury has accepted, Sir Anthony got together with Taubman and played monopoly. The two gentlemen agreed that all that tiresome competition between the two companies was robbing both of profit. For years sellers had carved out good deals for themselves by threatening to take their art, jewellery and furniture to the other house for auction unless commissions were cut.

The two businessmen decided to end all that with a simple but illegal agreement that they would both fix their commission prices. Christie's made their announcement in March 1995 and Sotheby's followed suit shortly. Now the customer had no material difference to choose between the two companies that controlled 90 per cent of the market. The deal, in operation between 1995 and 1999, saved them a tidy £280m.

But while Mr Taubman now faces financial ruin and possibly prison, Sir Anthony sits tight in Britain. The US would love to have warmed a seat for him at the trial. But in Britain fair competition and such price-fixing is not covered by the extradition treaty between the two countries.

Sir Anthony faces arrest if he ever sets foot on American soil again. So he's simply not going to.

If this doesn't seem like punishment enough for Sir Anthony, then muse for a while on how strange Britain is. Here is a country which likes to give the impression that it has wholly embraced the savage logic of competition as the best market regulator, and the best method of delivering a lean, mean product to the consumer. But in this affair, price-fixing remained a private matter between the ripper-off and the ripped-off.

Christie's and Sotheby's have both had to return money to customers who have sued them in the wake of the revelations. Neither company disputes that a cartel was in operation. But this trial was about calling individuals to criminal account for their unscrupulous behaviour. Our Government seems very keen on learning from America. Isn't it time that we learned from its anti-trust laws?

Muse, too, on how very close both Taubman and Sir Anthony came to never being found out at all, and how much personal room for manoeuvre the latter still has when it comes to protesting his innocence. Which, even though he declined to face court and give evidence, he does.

The American authorities began investigating the art market generally in 1997, a couple of years after the auction houses had begun operating their cartel. Who knows why a specific investigation was never ordered. After all, it was obvious that the normal dynamics of competition were no longer pertinent to the situation. But as long as the two companies could swear blind that the whole thing was nothing but a terrific coincidence, then neither could be touched. And for quite some time, everyone did.

The edifice started to crumble when Christie's decided to sack the company's US president, Patricia Hambrecht, and she decided to report what she knew to Christie's lawyers. She told them that the company's chief executive, Christopher Davidge, had mentioned to her a conspiracy with Sotheby's.

They began an investigation, and spoke to Mr Davidge's former secretary, who told of meetings between Mr Davidge and his opposite number at Sotheby's, Dede Brooks. Mr Davidge, after negotiating a spectacular severance package for himself, admitted to his American lawyer that he had kept papers relevant to these meetings at his London flat, and these were eventually handed over to the Justice Department. This move is again connected to the workings of the American anti-trust laws.

The first party in an anti-trust conspiracy to admit guilt and offer assistance in gathering evidence can negotiate an amnesty from criminal prosecution. This Christie's did, although Sir Anthony, who had left the company in 1998, was not covered.

Now Brooks had become vulnerable, since she had been named in Mr Davidge's papers. She admitted her own guilt, but insisted that she had been acting under the orders of Taubman, in the hope that she herself would be treated with leniency if she co-operated. Thus the rats deserted the sinking ship.

As for the men who were left finally carrying the can, the interesting thing is that despite the gulf of 3,000 miles, and a cultural gulf that at first glimpse may seem just as wide, they are both exposed not so much as criminals but as amateurs. Sir Anthony, via naive memos given in evidence, is now portrayed as a man who was not equal to understanding his business.

Likewise, Taubman has been described in evidence as having poor accounting skills and a propensity for nodding off during board meetings. Both men, it becomes apparent, were in auctioneering for social, rather than business, reasons.

It was not because of this that the New York-based chairman was called to account, while the London-based chairman was not. But still it marks this case down as a fascinating tale of two cities, both of which encapsulate tensions between old money and new, business and birth. When representatives of both ways meet in the middle, in the way that Taubman and Sir Anthony did, accommodations can be made. But only one country will be caught out turning a blind eye to those accommodations.

d.orr@independent.co.uk