Gilt-Edged Auction in Monaco

Antique furniture becomes very big casino

The crowd in the chandelier-hung room at Monaco's elegant Winter Sporting Club was certainly stellar, stippled with the rich (Greek Shipowner Stavros Niarchos, London Merchandising Millionaire Sir Charles Clore), the royal (Britain's Princess Alexandra) and the pop (ex-Beatle Ringo Starr). But the real stunners were the prices being paid for the glittering collection of French antique furniture and objets d'art that were on the block in what Sotheby Parke Bernet hoped would be the auction of the year.

So it was. On sale were 201 antiques from the 18th and 19th centuries that once belonged to the famed Wildenstein family of art dealers. The collection was bought in 1977 by Akram Ojjeh, a Saudi Arabian entrepreneur who lives in France. Even Sotheby's normally unflappable chief auctioneer Peter C. Wilson was astonished at the frenetic pace of the bidding, which often drove prices three or four times as high as most dealers had expected. A pair of Louis XV corner cabinets went for $608,920, and a folio cabinet fetched $655,760. But the most breathtaking buy was a garishly ornate Louis XV corner cabinet. The contenders were two agents working for anonymous buyers and Art Dealer Andrew Ciechanowieski of London's Heim Gallery. As the salon fell silent with tension, the three repeatedly raised the price in jumps of $117,000. Finally, Ciechanowieski, nodding his head, raised the bid to $1.7 million--more than three times the amount ever paid for a single piece of furniture in an auction. All told, the collection fetched $12.8 million, which made the Monaco auction second in size only to the sale, for $34 million, of the famed Robert von Hirsch collection of rare art and furniture in England last year.

The cause of the rise is growing anxiety among rich people to find ways to shield their wealth from inflation. Says Stanley F. Clark, a director of Sotheby Parke Bernet: "There is no doubt that fine furniture is being bought as an investment."

Owner Ojjeh apparently turned a handsome profit on the sale. He bought the collection from the Wildenstein family two years ago reportedly for $7 million. At the time, he said he wanted the antiques to furnish luxury salons aboard the liner France, which he had bought with the intention at first of turning the mothballed superliner into a floating casino. Last week Ojjeh also sold the France, for $18 million, to Norwegian Shipowner Knut Kloster, who will rechristen the ship Norway and use it for Caribbean cruises.

Ojjeh's rash of sales started rumors that he was in financial disfavor with the Saudi royal family. Their patronage is crucial to the Syrian-born Ojjeh, whose checkered career includes a Sorbonne degree in philosophy and two convictions on French smuggling raps. In recent years he has made millions as an arms procurer and builder of military bases in Saudi Arabia. Ojjeh's spokesman dismissed the reports as nonsense, and at week's end he was said to be negotiating a $293 million deal to buy aircraft from Dassault-Breguet, the French planemaker, presumably on behalf of the Saudi government. Nor has Ojjeh's opulence declined. At last count he owned ten Rolls-Royces, 30 Mercedes and two Boeing 707s. Says he: "I do not lack the necessities of life."

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