Luxury auction house Antiquorum is under fire by a disgruntled buyer who claims it is bilking high-end watch collectors out of thousands of dollars with counterfeit timepiece sales.
Antiquorum, which has offices in New York, Geneva and Hong Kong, has sold millions in luxury watches since 1974. Big sales by the auction house include $596,000 for a Longines wristwatch once owned by Albert Einstein, a $52,500 Omega owned by Elvis Presley and a Zenith pocket watch owned by Mahatma Gandhi that sold for a whopping $2.1 million.
California executive Patrick Yuan claims the auction house sold him a phony A. Lange & Söhne watch and refuses to refund him the money. Yuan paid $4,625 for the watch in December 2010, but when he took it to the manufacturer to be serviced in 2012, they told him the timepiece was in fact made by another watch company, Laco.
Yuan contacted Antiquorum’s management for a refund, but was told the issue had to be taken up with Antiquorum CEO Evan Zimmermann and CFO Bruno Ayanian. After e-mail correspondence with the company, Yuan says he’s heard nothing from either executive.
Yuan also said he visited their Manhattan office on Madison Avenue twice last week with the watch, but was told that Zimmermann and Ayanian were not there. “This was my first and last purchase from them,” said Yuan.
But Zimmermann, who insists he was never told of Yuan’s visit to their offices, told Page Six on Friday that the company reached out to Yuan asking him to send the watch in for verification, and assured us “the matter will be resolved to his satisfaction.”
Zimmermann also strongly denied that the company was in any financial trouble.
Meanwhile, another former Antiquorum watch dealer, Bob Maron, is being sued by singer John Mayer for $656,000 after he allegedly sold Mayer seven counterfeit Rolexes beginning in 2007. The sales, however, did not take place while Maron worked for Antiquorum.