The international auction house Christie’s is to handle the sale of 85 works by the artist Miró that belonged to the scandal hit BPN. The February auction in London will aim to shift the paintings that have been in state ownership since the expensive nationalisation of the Portuguese Business Bank (BPN).
"Christie's won the contest to handle the sale from three other international auction houses,” said Francisco Nogueira Leite, president of Parvalorem which holds the works on behalf of the public.
In July 2012, the then Secretary of the Treasury, now Finance Minister, Maria Luís Albuquerque announced at a hearing before a committee of inquiry into the BPN scandal that the Government would consult leading international auction houses in order to conduct a "public auction with all transparency" to sell this unique collection of works by the Catalan painter.
At the time that BPN was bailed out in 2008, the value of this collection was said to be over €80 million. Christie's was chosen to run the auction that promises to capture the attention of collectors around the world.
BPN, or Banco Português de Negócios, used to be a private bank but was nationalised by a panic-stricken government in 2008 after bad management and fraud gave rise to a debt of €1.8 billion.
Portugal's then Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos told a press conference after a special cabinet meeting that the government was to assure all deposits in BPN, and that the management of BPN was to be handed to Caixa Geral de Depositos under Bank of Portugal supervision from November 3, 2008, to prevent a financial chain reaction in Portugal.
Portuguese judicial authorities arrested the former president of BPN, José Oliveira e Costa on charges of tax fraud, money laundering, forgery, abuse of credit and illegal gains.
The BPN bailout was particularly sensitive because of its political implications as Portugal's President Cavaco Silva and many of his political cronies had personal and business relationships with the bank and with Oliveira e Costa.
On the grounds of avoiding a potentially serious financial crisis in the Portuguese economy, the government decided to nationalise the worthless bank at a massive cost to the taxpayer.
In 2011 Paulo Portas was accused in Parliament of poor negotiation when the bank was sold to Angola’s BIC bank for a miserly €40 million with the state absorbing nearly all of BPN's bad assets and non-deposit liabilities at a cost of over €2 billion, plus all unforeseen and potential future liabilities that will cost the state even more as time goes by.
Paulo Portas's low-key stance on BPN after he became minister contradicted his prior stance as a ferocious critic of bailing out BPN at astronomical cost to the state.
In a buoyant art market the Miró works should do well but will only make a small impact on the massive liabilities assumed by the public through the generosity of a government which bailed out a crooked bank to save the embarassment and blushes of the political elite.
