Her main opponent is one of the couple’s longtime employees, a soft-spoken, snowy-haired historian named Kyriakos Koutsomallis, who manages the art collection of the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation in Athens, which claims a right to some of the disputed art. Mr. Koutsomallis and the foundation are currently transforming a neoclassical mansion in Athens to become a 12-story museum that’s expected to display at least some of the Goulandris collection when it opens early next year. Mr. Koutsomallis, along with relatives on Mr. Goulandris’s side of the family, claim the most valuable pieces of the couple’s art collection—83 works— were quietly sold to an offshore company several years before Mr. Goulandris died and should not be part of any inheritance claims. Twenty nine of those 83 paintings—including some choice works like Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 “Olive Pickers” —have since been redirected back to the foundation, Mr. Koutsomallis has said in court papers, and are therefore not part of the widow’s estate. No one will say where the remaining works are located.
To finance her continuing court battles, Ms. Zaimis has made an unusual arrangement with a longtime New York private dealer, Ezra Chowaiki. In exchange for the lucrative rights to sell any paintings should Ms. Zaimis eventually prevail, Mr. Chowaiki said he has helped fund a case in Greece which Ms. Zaimis filed in 2001 and later shifted to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
Arrangements like these are rare outside the realm of Nazi art restitution. Heirs to lost Jewish fortunes often team up with art lawyers who work for a promised share of any eventual art sales—an arrangement depicted in last year’s Helen Mirren film, “Woman in Gold.”
Now, art lawyers are following the Goulandris case to see if Mr. Chowaiki’s long bet on the collection, which he estimates is valued at $3 billion, will pay off or flounder. No estate worth more than roughly $500 million has ever come to auction. Thomas C. Danziger, a New York art lawyer who isn’t involved with the case, said, “It’s Agatha Christie meets Homer.”
One big reason for the ownership dispute: Mr. Goulandris died in 1994 without a will. After his death at age 81, relatives from his side of the family say they told his widow that in 1985 Mr. Goulandris had sold off the 83 gems of the couple’s collection to a Panamanian company controlled by his side of the family. It was called Wilton Trading. Mr. Goulandris was in debt at the time, the relatives say, and thus he accepted a firesale price of $31.7 million, or roughly $382,000 apiece. Elise Goulandris didn’t initially know about the sale but she allegedly went along with it, relatives said in court documents.
Ms. Goulandris lived for another six years. Her own will, which she drew up after her husband died, contained no detailed inventory of the art collection and didn’t acknowledge the disputed sale of the 83 masterpieces. She bequeathed what she described as “antiquarian objects of value” to her Athens foundation for a possible museum. She didn’t specify which objects should go to it.
Her will also excluded everyone on her husband’s side of the family. Whatever didn’t go to the foundation was to be distributed by Mr. Koutsomallis among six beneficiaries on her side of the family, who didn’t learn about the alleged sale of the 83 prized works until after Ms. Goulandris died, according to Ms. Zaimis.
Ms. Zaimis—who is one of the six named beneficiaries—doesn’t believe the sale ever happened. She said she doubts her uncle would have sold off his prized collection without telling his wife or getting a fair market price for the works. She believes her uncle’s relatives absconded with the art after her aunt died and then produced an elaborate tale to suit their agenda.
Ms. Zaimis filed a civil suit in Greece 15 years ago that has since shifted to Switzerland—because her aunt lived in Lausanne—alleging Mr. Koutsomallis and the foundation inappropriately excluded her aunt’s art assets from her estate. The suit is ongoing. A preliminary investigation into possible fraud is also under way in Liechtenstein, according to the public prosecutor there.
Certain facts seem to support Ms. Zaimis’ version of events. The 83 paintings in dispute remained in Mr. Goulandris’s possession for the rest of his life. He continued to lend them to museums and listed them in exhibit catalogs and artists’ catalogue raisonnés as being part of his and his wife’s collection. According to a paper expert hired by one Swiss prosecutor, the type of paper on which the original contract of sale was printed wasn’t manufactured until three years after Mr. Goulandris allegedly signed it.
Mr. Koutsomallis, the couple’s longtime foundation executive, told Swiss investigators in testimony six years ago that he didn’t know about the alleged $31.7 million sale until years later, and he said, “Admittedly, the agreed price for the artworks is very low.”
Documents leaked as part of the Panama Papers in April may end up having a bearing on the case: They reveal that three paintings put up for auction at Sotheby’s in 2005 by anonymous sellers were actually offered by Mr. Goulandris’s younger sister. The paintings—a Bonnard and two Chagalls—were part of the group of 83 paintings that Basil Goulandris allegedly sold in 1985. If the sale never happened, then Mr. Goulandris’s sister did not have the right to sell them, according to Ms. Zaimis.
Jean-Christophe Diserens, a Swiss lawyer who represents the foundation and Mr. Koutsomallis, said in an email that “nobody but Ms. Zaimis and her sponsors contest the validity” of Mr. Goulandris’s sale of the 83 paintings. Mr. Diserens also said Mr. Koutsomallis, who was also executor of Ms. Goulandris’s estate, “has strictly respected Mrs. Goulandris’s will and the written instructions he had received.”
Evanthea Veroutis-Anastasadi, Ms. Zaimis’s sister, said Thursday she respects her sister’s convictions but feels all their aunt’s art should be located and shipped to the foundation’s museum, not dispersed among family members. “No one is innocent in this situation—and it’s easy to want more and more—but I’ve decided to stay neutral,” Ms. Veroutis-Anastasadi said. “My peace of mind is more important than any collection.”
Three of the other four beneficiaries declined to comment; messages left with one more, and the Swiss lawyer who has represented them all, Jacques Haldy, were not returned. Representatives from Basil Goulandris’s side of the family declined to comment.
Of the 83 masterpieces that sit at the center of this dispute, only a few have even been seen in the past two decades, stoking curiosity about their whereabouts. Of that group, Mr. Koutsomallis, the couple’s art expert, told investigators that he could only pinpoint the location of 29 works because he said the widow had reclaimed them from her husband’s relatives and held them in another foundation called Sirina in Liechtenstein, according to Swiss court documents. But Ms. Zaimis and her lawyer say they don’t think Ms. Goulandris ever arranged for Sirina to own any of her art, including van Gogh’s “The Olive Pickers.” Today, dealers say that painting alone could sell for as much as $200 million.
A GREEK EPIC
When Basil Goulandris was born on the Greek island of Andros in 1913, his family was known for its discretion. Tabloids didn’t follow him around like they did Greece’s other young tycoons like Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis, who were both a few years older than him.
Mr. Goulandris proved no less ambitious, though. His grandfather, John, and father, Peter, built a business running sailing merchant ships and steamships throughout the Mediterranean. In the postwar economic boom, Mr. Goulandris and his four brothers transformed that firm, Orion Shipping and Trading, into a multibillion-dollar fleet of oceangoing oil tankers and cargo ships.
In 1950, Mr. Goulandris was living in New York when he met and married Elise Karadontis, a young divorcee from Athens. A few months after the ceremony, his eldest brother died of a heart attack. Mr. Goulandris, at age 37, stepped up and ran the firm for decades afterward.
Ms. Zaimis said her aunt and uncle shared a love of art, and the couple started collecting soon after they married, befriending artists like Marc Chagall and buying from galleries in Paris and New York.
They bought seminal pieces for their home like van Gogh’s “Olive Pickers” as well as pieces by significant living artists in Greece like sculptor Michael Tombros, who also hailed from the island of Andros. In 1979, the couple started a foundation and bought a building in Andros’s capital city of Hora to display Tombros’s pieces. They assigned one of their young employees, Mr. Koutsomallis, to help the foundation run their Museum of Contemporary Art.
In 1993, the year before Mr. Goulandris died and eight years after he allegedly sold off his best art, he and his wife announced they were going to create an even bigger $30 million museum specifically for their modern art in Athens designed by I.M. Pei. But four years after that, Ms. Goulandris, then widowed, had to go back to the drawing board after Greek archaeologists discovered the proposed museum site was on top of ancient ruins. The Greek culture ministry insisted she find somewhere else to build.
In 1999, Ms. Goulandris displayed in Andros for the first time the cream of her collection, a sumptuous survey of 29 pieces that Mr. Koutsomallis later told investigators she culled from the original group of 83 works and publicly exhibited as belonging to the Goulandris collection. She called the show “The Classics of Modern Art,” and it included van Gogh’s “Olive Pickers” as well as his sunny, large table scene from 1888, “Still Life with Coffee Pot.”
Basil Goulandris’s side of the family has said in court papers that the 29 paintings in the show had been donated to Ms. Goulandris’s Sirina foundation by Wilton Trading. Wilton’s founder Maria Goulandris, who was married to Basil’s older brother, donated the 29 works to Sirina in honor of the museum idea in 1992, according to court testimony by Maria’s son Peter John Goulandris.
Elise Goulandris died on July 25, 2000 at age 82.
Two months later, Ms. Zaimis said Mr. Koutsomallis came to her house and read her aunt’s will, including three pages she had written out by hand in 1997.
In it she distinguished between her assets that could not be moved, like her seven homes, and her “movables” like art, assigning Mr. Koutsomallis to “separate whatever he considers to be antiquarian objects of value that are suitable for a museum. These objects will devolve to the foundation,” she wrote. Everything else, she added, she wanted to go to six beneficiaries on her side of the family—including her sister Marie’s two daughters, Ms. Zaimis and Ms. Veroutis-Anastasadi, who also lives in Greece, and four other cousins.
Mr. Koutsomallis handed Ms. Zaimis an inventory listing Ms. Goulandris’s assets, which included houses and an array of household goods like cutlery. “Where are the valuable things, the paintings?” she said she asked him. That’s when she said she first heard about the sale and how the remaining art had funneled to the foundation.
Ms. Zaimis questioned whether postwar paintings by Jackson Pollock or Francis Bacon could be considered “antiquarian objects,” using the will’s parlance. To her, that phrase referred only to her aunt’s antiquities and antique furniture, not her paintings. Her concerns were dismissed.
She said she tried to talk to her sister and her cousins about the matter, but she said they were spooked by another line in Ms. Goulandris’s will that warned beneficiaries not to object to the decisions made by Mr. Koutsomallis, her estate executor, in divvying her assets. If they did, they could risk forfeiting their right to that contested asset.
She filed a civil lawsuit against him in Greece early the following year, claiming the paintings were wrongfully excluded from her aunt’s estate. The courts there said Switzerland had jurisdiction since Ms. Goulandris lived in Lausanne, so the case shifted to Lausanne.
Around the same time, Mr. Chowaiki—a dealer in New York known for selling blue-chip paintings by artists like Miró and Lichtenstein—said he got a tantalizing call from a friend who had heard that the Goulandris foundation in Athens was quietly looking to sell one of its masterpieces, van Gogh’s “Olive Pickers” for $70 million. According to the art dealer’s account, a few days before Christmas in 2001, Mr. Chowaiki said he and a billionaire client of his met Mr. Koutsomallis at a storage warehouse in Lausanne, where he entered a small room and saw the painting lying flat on a table, “like an autopsy,” he said.
Over the next few weeks, Mr. Chowaiki said he tried to whittle the price down, but he said the deal allegedly stalled at $55 million and Mr. Chowaiki walked away, disappointed.
The foundation’s lawyer Mr. Diserens disputes this account, saying in an email statement last week that Mr. Koutsomallis never tried to sell the van Gogh to Mr. Chowaiki, whose version of the story he called “pure calumny.”
Mr. Chowaiki said from 2001 on, he was aware of the Goulandris case, and he was pleased when a friend of Ms. Zaimis called him the following year, seeking his help. Mr. Chowaiki was told that Ms. Zaimis was looking for art experts to testify about the foundation’s activities, and she asked him if he might be willing to testify in Greek court about the alleged offer in Lausanne.
The dealer eventually did one better: After speaking with her regularly for nearly a year, he also offered to help pay Ms. Zaimis’s legal fees in exchange for securing first dibs to any paintings she might choose to sell if she won. “Would I have done this had I known what all it would become?” Mr. Chowaiki said later of their pact. “Who knows, but I’ve spent millions at this point, so I’m all in.”
Mr. Chowaiki said it took years before he or Ms. Zaimis could piece together the back story of the alleged $31.7 million sale in 1985. Even now, he said he doesn’t believe it ever happened.
In court proceedings in Lausanne in 2010, Mr. Goulandris’s relatives testified that the shipping mogul agreed to the sale; he had debts and needed cash.
Peter John Goulandris, the nephew on Basil Goulandris’s side and the former chairman of the porcelain maker Waterford Wedgwood, confirmed in court proceedings that he and his older sister Chryss Goulandris had received some of Wilton’s art holdings after their mother died in 2005. Messages left with Peter John Goulandris at the family office at Orion Shipping were not returned.
When Ms. Zaimis was given a chance to read this sale agreement for the first time in 2008 as part of the Swiss court proceedings, she declared the contract a fraud. The allegation of fraud triggered the regional court to launch a concurrent, criminal investigation into the matter. Last year, the Swiss public prosecutor’s office chose not to indict the foundation, citing a lack of evidence of fraud, according to a court clerk for the prosecutor’s office. Ms. Zaimis’s lawyers appealed the decision two months ago. Now, both sides are waiting to see whether the court drops the criminal case, files its own indictment or orders another prosecutor to further investigate. The civil case will continue no matter what, said Ron Soffer, Ms. Zaimis’ lawyer in Paris.
Three months ago, a report published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which helped break the Panama Papers leak, offered further clues to the fate of three more paintings Basil Goulandris allegedly sold. The report is based on documents leaked from Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca that allegedly helped create offshore tax havens for its wealthy clients. (The Wall Street Journal has not independently verified these documents.)
According to the April 8 report, Mr. Goulandris’s only sister, Marie “Doda” Voridis, was the secret seller of three paintings put up for auction in 2005. It’s unclear exactly how she received them, but the works included a Pierre Bonnard that went unsold in Sotheby’s Feb. 8, 2005 sale in London, as well as a pair of Marc Chagall paintings that sold to anonymous buyers for $2.3 million and $2.5 million in the same auction. Ms. Voridis died last year. In the works’ ownership histories, Sotheby’s lists the works as having been owned by Basil Goulandris.
If these pieces were sold in the mid-1980s, as Mr. Goulandris’s relatives say, it’s unclear how the trio of paintings made it back into the collection of the sister, who decided to sell them five years after Ms. Goulandris died. If they were never sold off during Mr. Goulandris’s lifetime, as his niece alleges, they should have funneled to his widow’s estate.
The whereabouts of the rest remain unknown, at least publicly.
Back in Athens, Ms. Zaimis, who lives half an hour away from the museum site now under construction, says she is monitoring its development. But the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation Museum opening early next year hardly represents checkmate.
“I’m keeping my walls empty until my paintings come home to me,” she said.
