The world of millionaires is full of stories of betrayal, disloyalty and fortune hunters who seek to profit from economic tranquility of the 1% of the population whose pulse is not altered by paying 20,000 euros for a chair.
Jan Koum, one of the founders of WhatsApp, has recently been the victim of one of these abuses. The millionaire has demanded to the interior designer who decorated a good part of his mansions and their yachts for scamming him with furniture and other decorative objects, which he passed off as luxury pieces, when in reality they were nothing more than crude imitations at best.
They also give millionaires a hard time
According what was published by the British Dailymail, The co-founder of WhatsApp is immersed in a legal battle with the French interior designer Remi Tessier, accused of selling him counterfeit luxury products and of applying extra costs on the decoration bills for his mansions and superyachts.
The dispute arose when Koum discovered that several pieces he purchased through Tessier were simple imitations that neither had the expected quality of a luxury piece nor the price of a piece of junk.
The interior designer’s scam ranged from designer furniture to rugs made by hand by artisans with a centuries-old tradition, who later turned out not to be artisans. According to published data by luxurylaunchesthe complaint details that the millionaire paid extra costs of between 10% and 20% on purchases made through his interior designer.
An example would be a luxury chair for which the magnate paid 19,550 euros instead of the 12,400 euros it cost in the store, or the 1,731 euros he paid for a glassware set that actually cost just over 1,000 euros.
What is even more serious is that the scam by his interior designer was not limited to adding a bite in his favor, the matter escalated when in charge of decorating the interior of his properties he was billed 642,000 euros for a supposed set of pashmina rugs that were supposedly made by hand.
As revealed in the documents attached to the lawsuit, the rugs were be fakes Made with low-cost synthetic materials that did not cost even half of what the millionaire paid for them.
The lawsuit also revealed somewhat more complex practices to deceive the millionaire. One of them was to transform prices between dollars and euros to benefit from exchange differences.
Bites left and right
According to collect he New York PostTessier helped decorate five of the millionaire’s homes, and from his studio in Paris, where he employs 15 people, Tessier decorates the homes and yachts of some of the richest people in the world. Among his billionaire clients are names as Larry Ellison and Ken Griffin, who are suspected of having also applied cost overruns showing a “predatory pattern,” as the lawsuit specifies.
However, Tessier not only inflated his customers’ invoices, but also demanded commissions from the distributors who provided them with the products. The lawsuit indicates that the French interior designer convinced the millionaire of Ukrainian origin to buy a Picasso valued at 7.8 million dollars. On this occasion, the painting was authentic, as were the $600,000 that Tessier pocketed in a hidden payment from the gallery that sold it and that was never communicated to the millionaire.
Jan Koum, has manifested that this lawsuit is not about personal gain, ensuring that any economic recovery will be donated to charities in France. “It’s about protecting others,” said Orin Snyder, Koum’s attorney in this case.
According to the British media. Designer Remi Tessier rejected the accusations of fraud, claiming to have acted with respect towards Koum and reproaching the decision to take the matter to trial. “I reject all allegations against me. I have always treated Jan with the utmost respect and protected his privacy. I am surprised he took this action.”
Image | Flickr (Hubert Burda Media), Unsplash (Kam Idris)
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