In connection with the latest buzzard, Alisher Usmanov is often mentioned, as the current owner of "In Contact". I recall this name a decade ago. In 2007, shortly after the death of Rostropovich, in London at the auction Sotheby's was exhibited them with Vishnevskaya family collection of Russian art. Almost half a thousand lots, among which are paintings by Bryullov, Venetsianov, Aivazovsky, Repin, Roerich, Kustodiev, Levitan, Nesterov, and others.. , Porcelain of the imperial plants and factories of the brothers Kornilov and Miklashevsky, glass, silverware, jewelery and t.

As usual, a few months before the auction, the auction house sent its customers a two-volume catalog, which, naturally, got to Moscow. And then it started. Both museum directors, experts, and experts on Russian antiquity howled like, so many of the masterpieces in the catalog were recently in Russia, it's our national treasure, and, in general, how they could have been abroad.

Clearly, it reached the Kremlin, and then the team Usmanov received from there - without waiting for the bidding date, to fly to London, to buy the entire collection to a single lot and return to Russia.

Of course, Usmanov successfully completed the assignment, paying more than 40 million British pounds for the entire meeting, whereas initially it was planned to gain for him an amount half as large.

This was a phenomenal case in the long history of the famous auction house, when all lots of the planned trades were bought by one person before the bidding itself. Another similar story was with the eggs of Vekselberg-Faberge, but about it some other time.

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