Rudy kurniawan & global wine auction fraud thread (merged)

WINE TALK
8824

I suspect that the Marshal’s Service will attempt to determine if the bottles seized from Wine Cellarage are authentic and, if they are, sell them. The money from the sale of those wines would then be used as restitution recovery funds to the victims who filed claims.

But, of course, this still leaves unresolved the remaining Rudy wines in the possession of Christie’s (in the UK and Geneva) which are the subject of the forfeiture order. At this point those assets belong to the US government, not to Christie’s or to Rudy. I don’t know if the US government has a way to force Christie’s to turn over those assets or not, but I would hope so.

8825

How about if John and Allen throw a Happy Homecoming wine dinner, when Rudy is released from his “cellar”? “We will serve no wine, before his time (is served).”

8826

You know the legalities more than I Don. However, I think the US Government thinks they belong to them, but they don’t because they’re not on US soil, so the US government has no rights to them. I believe that they’re in the possession of Christie’s because of a seemingly legal storage agreement between them and the owner, RK. There’s no reason for Christie’s to turn them over to the US government without an order from the British and Swiss government, respectively, because that’s where the bottles are. I’m sure Christie’s doesn’t want to be in the middle of this, but they also don’t want to open themselves up to liability because an entity in another country claims ownership. That needs to be adjudicated in the countries the assets are housed in.

8827

As it turns out, under UK law the British government, if requested by the US government, will register the criminal judgment and Asset Forfeiture Order, and will assign a UK prosecutor to commence the asset forfeiture/enforcement proceedings. The UK government has two statutes – the Proceeds of Crime Act of 2002 and the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act of 2005 which contain provisions to provide cross-border assistance to foreign governments with respect to recovering assets for the victims of crime. According to a UK-government-published summary of the relevant statutes written by the Head of the Central Confiscation Unit of the UK Crown Prosecution Service (Organised Crime Division), the process is relatively simple. A Letter of Request is filed with the United Kingdom Central Authority. (It can even be emailed or faxed and it may be proceeded by direct police agency to police agency contact in conjunction with the request.) Provided the letter of request contains the required documentation, the UK government then assigns a prosecutor to commence an action under Article 20 of the 2005 Act. Article 20 provides that the court must give effect to an external criminal asset seizure/forfeiture order by registering it where all the following conditions are satisfied:

  • (a) The external order was made on the conviction of the person named in the order and no appeal is outstanding in respect of that conviction.
    (b) The external order is in force and no appeal is outstanding in respect of it.
    (c) Giving effect to the external order would not be incompatible with any of the Convention rights of any person affected by it.
    (d) Where the confiscation order confiscates specified property other than money, that property is not subject to a charge under UK asset recovery legislation.

The UK court has the power to appoint a receiver. The court is required to provide the party from whom the assets are proposed to be seized an opportunity to demonstrate that the property in question is not owned by the defendant subject to the asset seizure/forfeiture order.

8828

Hands Across The Ocean

:grinning:

8829

Same is true for Switzerland. If the US government asks for it, Switzerland will open proceeding to determine if help is needed and justified (which is a no brainer).

8830

You naughty boys are going to screw up Rudy’s retirement deal.

8831

Don - tthis was posted on reddit recently. Would love to get an opinion ,especially of the 1900 latour :slight_smile:

3629×2722 1.03 MB

8832

Cheap Sassicaia !!!

8833

4200 BOTTLES OF HIGHLY-SOPHISTICATED COUNTERFEIT SASSICAIA SEIZED NEAR MILAN ITALY

Thanks for posting this. I was unaware of this. But the situation with the fake Sassacaia has very eerie similarity to the counterfeit DRC ring that operated out of Milan a few years ago. As the CNN article you posted the link to says:

Officials from the Guardia di Finanza said the sophisticated counterfeit operation > bottled inferior wine from Sicily in a warehouse near Milan, with meticulously reproduced labeling and cases that came from Bulgaria. > "The bottles and the packaging were > perfectly identical to the originals,> " Dario Sopranzetti, a colonel in the financial police, told reporters. “Even the weight of the tissue paper was the same,” he said.
Two men, a father and son, have been put under house arrest > and 11 others placed under investigation following an operation launched last year, when a fake case of the wine fell off a truck and was found on the roadside.

This is a very similar story to the one that began on October 16, 2013 – when police conducted coordinated raids and searches in seven different countries in connection with a ring producing very sophisticated DRC counterfeits. At that time a father and son team in Milan was arrested for counterfeiting millions of dollars worth of Domaine Romanee Conti wines. The father and son were never identified in the press to my knowledge. The French government sought their extradition, but despite the multi-country police investigation and counterfeit wine seizures that took place in multiple countries via Europol and Eurojust, Italy refused to extradite that 2013 father-son team. Alexander Iugov (a/k/a Alexander Anikin) a person of Russian national origin living and operating out of Milan, who was allegedly a “major actor” in the DRC counterfeit ring, was arrested in Meursault on May 4, 2014. Iugov was eventually convicted in January of 2017 for counterfeiting and selling the counterfeit DRC wines. But he was released from prison in May of 2017 when he was sentenced in an amount equal to time served.

There seem to be too many coincidences here.

8834

I just saw this and was going to post it on a separate thread. A friend o mine opened a bottle of 2013 Sassicaia last month and discarded it; he said it tasted as bad wine… he purchased it in Italy.

8835

There are some additional details in other publications, including an article in Decanter Fake Sassicaia crime ring uncovered by Italian police - Decanter and the Drinks Business Italian police bust €2m fake Sassicaia ring - The Drinks Business There is also an article in The Guardian newspaper Italian police seize 4,000 bottles of counterfeit 'super Tuscan' wine | Italy | The Guardian

The police seized 41 cases of finished counterfeit Sassicaia - mostly from the 2010 and 2015 vintages. The Italian police estimated that around 700 cases of fake wine per month were being sold. Allegedly 11 individuals were involved in the counterfeit ring and the “father-son” duo from the Milan area are under “house arrest.” The police claimed to have evidence that the ring has been operating for more than a year. There was evidence of approximately 1,000 cases worth of orders being taken from Chinese, Korean and Russian buyers at about 70% less than the cost of the authentic Sassicaia.

8836

A video was posted on youtube showing what the Italian Financial Police found in the raid on the counterfeit Sassicaia warehouse:

8837

Incredible.

8838

MORE ON THE SEIZURE OF THE COUNTERFEIT SASSICAIA IN MILAN

This is not the first time that the Italian government has seized a substantial quantity of counterfeit Sassicaia, but it appears to be the most sophisticated such counterfeiting effort found to date. In 2000, the Italian government seized approximately 16,000 bottles of fake Sassicaia. But the level of sophistication of the earlier counterfeits was quite different. For example, on December 11, 2008 James Suckling of the Wine Spectator, wrote an article describing tasting a counterfeit Sassicaia at a friend’s house in Pisa. Drinking Fake Sassicaia | Wine Spectator As Suckling noted: “The big giveaway was the branded cork that didn’t have a vintage printed on it. And the bottle was a modern dark-green bottle with a long neck. The bottles of current vintages of Sass are not like that, and all of the recent vintages, as well as earlier ones, have the vintage printed on the cork.” Suckling was able to readily identify the counterfeit by comparison with known authentic bottles – the way that most counterfeit wines are detected.

As to the newly seized bottles, the Florence police claim that the bottles, labels, corks, capsules, wood boxes, printed tissue paper, and even the printed security banding for the wood cases appear identical to the ones used on authentic Sassicaia. The video (link shown in my prior post) shows the wood-burned boxes (complete with vintage date on the exterior of the box), fully branded corks bearing vintage dates and counterfeit security banding used to seal the wood boxes. According to an article in Forbes, the counterfeiters “used perfect copies of the labels including original holograms and distinctive features.” Italian Police Bust Counterfeit Wine Ring Producing ‘World’s Best Wine’ As noted previously, Dario Sopranzetti, the spokesperson for the Florence Financial Police stated that “The bottles and the packaging were perfectly identical to the originals. Even the weight of the tissue paper was the same.”

Hopefully, Maureen Downey or Michael Egan will have a chance to perform a side by side comparison looking at the glass, paper, printing and inks to see if there are any differences that that the wine counterfeiting experts can discern.

But assuming that counterfeiters are able to produce wines with no visible differences from simple physical examination, that makes detecting counterfeits all but impossible for the trade. This should also be a four alarm fire warning to all of the producers of the highest priced wine brands, and to wine buyers who purchase high-end wine that the simple security bells and whistles that are currently being utilized like holograms, ink visible only under ultra-violet light, and printed banding can be, and now demonstrably have been, duplicated by the counterfeiters. In the case of 2015 Sassiacaia, this occurred on a wine which sells for $150 to $250 a bottle in Europe and $230 to $300 in the US. The level of attention being paid to anti-counterfeiting measures is not even close to what it needs to be to protect the brands that are the targets of the counterfeiters.

8839

Good way for counterfeiters to kill the joy of a hobby. Thank you.

8840

I’m surprised such a sophisticated counterfeiting ring would be dedicated to making fake Sassicaia including fake OWCs and banding.

Frankly, I imagine there’s a much more lucrative market faking premium champagne with all that is sold at bars and clubs to people who have no idea what they’re drinking and only care about the label. It can’t be easy to get fake wine into the supply chain of wine shops and high end restaurants. I’d imagine club owners to be much more amenable/less suspicious to buying outside their normal supply chains than a wine shop owner or grocery store. I guess faking true Champagne is logistically harder due to secondary fermentation, but again, you could probably bottle tank method bubbles and most/all club clientele would have no idea … and it’s not like it’s an unsolvable mystery that only top champagne houses have figured out. There’s plenty of producers making “traditional method” sparkling wine … if these folks can figure out perfect Sassicaia OWCs, tissue paper, etc, they can figure that out too…

8841

Is it possible the counterfeiters were provided their packaging materials from the same places that supply it directly to Sassicaia? In other words, the packaging was actually “original” and the only thing counterfeit is what was in the bottles? I’m sure the Italian authorities will investigate this angle, no?

8842

He still gave it 96 points.

8843

are vintages always printed on the cork?