The “King of Freeports” Has Sold his Tariff–Free Singapore Freeport to Chinese Crypto Billionaire, Jihan Wu
Yves Bouvier, the Swiss art shipper at the heart of the ongoing legal wrangle, the Bouvier Affair, has sold his stake in Le Freeport for a reported $28.4 million.Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
The Singapore “Fort Knox” Le Freeport opened in 2010 as part of a serious attempt by Singapore to encourage art collectors and trading banks to store their wealth in the freeport located near Changi Airport. Yet since its inception, Le Freeport has suffered from numerous setbacks.
One of which is its strong association with the original founder of the freeport, Yves Bouvier, who has been in and out of the news for the past 10 years for his alleged role in defrauding “high net worth” clients, including the Monaco-based Russian oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovlev. It is alleged that Bouvier falsified the original cost of artworks and subsequently overcharged for them. On as many as 39 art transactions worth a reported $2bn, Rybolovlev has alleged that Bouvier defrauded him out of $1bn. One of those works is Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci. The disputed painting is the most expensive artwork ever sold, selling for a staggering $450 million in 2017 to a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Bouvier, once dubbed “the King of Freeports”, has so far denied all charges against him and even managed to have one of the cases dismissed, only for the Geneva courts to reopen the lawsuit in July of this year. The selling of the Freeport has come at a difficult time for Bouvier who stands to lose $40 million in the transaction as the original cost of building the Singapore Freeport was estimated at $70 million.
The buyer, Chinese billionaire Jihan Wu, made his money mining Bitcoin mining and founding Bitmain Technologies in 2013. Now that he no longer controls Bitmain, he is the Chairman of Bitdeer, a cloud-mining service which is the sole shareholder of Straitdeer Pte., which owns Asia Freeport Holdings Pte. Aged just 36 years old, he is considered one of the youngest billionaires in Asia and is now reportedly running his new venture, Matrixport (valued by Forbes at $1bn), a digital assets financial services platform.
It will be interesting to see how the purchase of Le Freeport will combine with Wu’s digital financial asset portfolio. It was reported in The Art Newspaper, that “Asia’s crypto billionaires have already expressed interest in both art for the Metaverse and for the contemporary museum.” Last year in 2021, the Chinese-born, 31-year-old Justin Sun made the winning bid of $78.4 million for Giacometti’s Le Nez (1947) at a Sotheby’s auction. The billionaire founder of the cryptocurrency platform TRON, has spent more than $100 million at auction in the last year and owns works by Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso.
Freeports have grown considerably in importance in recent years and the Geneva Freeport – the largest of Switzerland’s somewhat secretive customs complexes – is estimated to hold $100 billion worth of tax free goods with up to 75 percent of that made up of art and antiquities. It is believed that in that freeport alone, there are more than a thousand Pablo Picasso artworks stored there, alongside artworks by Andy Warhol, Leonardo Da Vinci and Vincent Van Gogh.