Rare manuscripts to be sold from alleged Paris pyramid scam
PARIS — Thousands of French investors are hoping to recover some of the money they lost in an alleged pyramid scheme when a collection of rare manuscripts goes up for auction starting next month.
The 130,000-piece collection has been estimated to be worth a sum that could run eight or nine figures. It includes the original 1785 manuscript for “The 120 Days of Sodom,” the explicit and ultimately influential novel the Marquis de Sade wrote in the Bastille prison.
A judge ordered the documents seized three years ago as part of a fraud investigation. Other valuable highlights are a hand-written testimony by an American survivor of the Titanic and a text written by King Louis XVI a few months before his beheading during the French Revolution.
The so-called Aristophil collection will be gradually sold at the prestigious Hotel Drouot auction house in Paris. About 300 auctions are expected to take place over at least six years.
Top lots for the first sale, scheduled for December 20, were displayed Tuesday outside Paris.
The works came from Aristophil, a company in Paris that police officers searched in November 2014 as part of an investigation into a suspected pyramid scam.
Founder Gerard Lheritier allegedly promised clients high profits from investments in the old books and manuscripts the company acquired. Financial stakes in the works were then allegedly resold to new investors to finance repayments to earlier ones.
Lheritier was given preliminary charges of organized fraud and Aristophil was placed in liquidation proceedings in 2015. The case has yet to be sent to a French court.
Auctioneer Claude Aguttes, who was appointed by French courts to preserve, secure, sort, assess and auction the works, told The Associated Press that some 18,000 French private customers — most of them with little familiarity in the specialized market for rare documents — were lured in by the promise of profits.