Antiquorum Auctioneers
Antiquorum Auctioneers, based in Geneva, Switzerland and founded in 1970 as Galerie d'Horlogerie Ancienne, established the modern auction market for watches. Using the knowledge of its founder, the watch repairer and dealer Osvaldo Patrizzi, Antiquorum was able to authenticate watches on their intricate and almost impossible to fake movements, rather than the readily altered external appearances of cases and FACES. Antiquorum was the first auction firm to auction fine watches over the Internet in the 1980s 1. The firm owns the Internet horology information and discussion site TimeZone.com.
Recently the company has admitted that manufacturers have bid on collectible examples of their own watches. It has been claimed that this tactic has warped the perceived investment value of modern watches, distorting the market for modern Swiss watches as well as earlier examples. 2
Bidding By Manufacturers
Antiquorum invented the tactic of using special brand-focussed auctions of older watches to promote modern watches made by the same manufacturer, and persuaded many manufacturers to support this activity with the claim that "Auctions are much stronger than advertising" .
Using this argument Antiquorum legitimately persuaded manufacturers to support its auctions by providing finance for auction catalogues and promotional parties, and to release watches from company museums so that they could be auctioned.
However, the auctioneer also have allowed at least two manufacturers - Patek Phillipe and Omega Watches - in bidding on watches made by their own companies. In the case of Omega, they had bid on an "estimated" 80 watches in a single auction , winning 46 of them, and in one case paying over £170,000 for a watch that had been expected to sell for one tenth of that price . However, it should be noted that there were many legitimate and important collectors also fiercely bidding against the manufacturers for these same pieces in the auctions.
Although Patrizzi denied that the bids were designed or likely to affect sales of current production watches 6, one US Omega dealer told The Wall Street Journal that
"...top-selling Omegas used to be $1,400 models, but Omegas costing three times that are selling now. 'Customers are conscious of the fact that an Omega watch sold for $300,000,' he says. 'They have no idea who bought it.'"7
Mis-governance Accusations
Antiquorum was effectively taken over by one of its major investors, the Japanese company ArtistHouse Holdings in August 2007. ArtistHouse alleged “financial management and governance” and retained PricewaterhouseCoopers to audit the company 8. Partrizzi continues to be supported by the company Habsburg Holdings, which owns 43% of Antiquorom 9, and has filed criminal and civil actions in retaliation for his ousting 10.