Hong Kong heiress sues gallery over alleged £500,000 Banksy fraud

An heiress to a billion-dollar Hong Kong beverage firm has sued one of many metropolis’s high artwork sellers over claims the gallery by no means delivered on her buy of a widely known portray by British artist Banksy. The lawsuit’s submitting coincides with the opening of this 12 months’s version of Artwork Basel in Hong Kong, town’s largest artwork honest.

Karen Lo, whose grandfather Lo Kwee-Seong grew to become a billionaire after founding soy milk big Vitasoy in 1940, filed a lawsuit this week claiming that she by no means obtained a Banksy portray she bought from Pearl Lam, whose eponymous gallery is likely one of the main artwork world gamers in Hong Kong, in accordance with Reuters.

In response to the criticism, Lo paid Lam £500,000 below the assumption the gallerist had bought on her behalf Banksy’s Present Me The Monet (2005), a parody of Impressionist Claude Monet’s collection of work of the backyard at his dwelling in Giverny that includes orange visitors cones, a discarded purchasing cart and different rubbish in a pond. The portray bought for £7.6m with charges at Sotheby’s London in 2020 to an Asian collector. On the time it was Banksy’s second most-valuable work to promote at public sale.

The difficulty is a “personal matter and we remorse it’s being litigated within the press”, Lam’s workplace advised Reuters, including that Lo had been supplied a full refund. Lo additionally accused Lam of not paying again a mortgage of HK$5m (virtually £520,000), in accordance with the South China Morning Publish.

The Pearl Lam Gallery is likely one of the 177 exhibitors participating on this 12 months’s Artwork Basel in Hong Kong honest as town bounces again from among the world’s most stringent Covid-19 pandemic restrictions.

Neither Lo nor Lam instantly responded to requests for remark from The Artwork Newspaper. Lo has made headlines lately for reportedly spending eight-digit sums on high-profile properties within the US, together with British rocker Sting’s former New York penthouse for $50m.