Middle East Fund Managers Now on Sotheby’s Reconfigured Board after Abu Dhabi Investment

In October, Sotheby’s announced that it had secured a $1 billion investment from ADQ, a sovereign wealth fund operated by Abu Dhabi’s government. Part of the arrangement stipulates that the auction house’s board would be reconfigured into a nine-person group, with three seats for managers associated with the Emirati fund.

At the time, it was unclear how the board would be reconfigured. It meant that for the first time, financial authorities in the Middle East would have a significant presence in how the heritage company was run. This marked a shift in the makeup of its highest levels of management, positions which have historically been held by money managers and lawyers based in Western countries.

In UK regulatory disclosures filed shortly after the announcement, Sotheby’s legal department said that H.E. Mohamed Hassan Alsuwaidi, the Minister of Investment Managing Director & CEO of ADQ, was one of the newly appointed directors to join the global auction house’s board. Alsuwaidi, a prominent political figure in the UAE, was previously involved in running the Mubadala Investment Company, another of the country’s sovereign wealth funds. (Due to the nature of ADQ’s status as a sovereign wealth fund, the government of Abu Dhabi was simultaneously listed as a controlling entity of Sotheby’s UK office.)

Along with Alsuwaidi, the remaining two UAE financial authorities now serving on Sotheby’s board are Murtaza Hussain and Aziz Moolji. The former is a managing partner at Lunate, an investment manager based in Abu Dhabi that launched in 2020 and is owned by Chimera Investment LLC, an entity that is part of Sheikh Tahnoun’s private investment firm Royal Group. Hussain previously served as ADQ’s chief investment officer.

Moolji is currently the director of ADQ’s M&A and Alternative Investments arm.

Sotheby’s did not internally announce the latest board appointments, but confirmed them separately to ARTnews. A spokesperson for the house declined to comment further.

These partners represent a new financial arrangement for the house, which reportedly suffered in the year after the pandemic. While the auction house does not comment on its profits, Sotheby’s UK branch, reported profit from art sales dipped after the pandemic, falling 36 percent between 2021 and 2023, from £34.5 million to £22 million. Its financial services arm, a separate subsidiary, reported a loss of $1.2 million in profit in the UK. Sales turnover also fell by 4 percent, and staff totals in the UK dropped by 10 percent as well in the same period, from 450 to 403. At the end of 2024, Sotheby’s CFO David Kownator claimed the house was in good financial standing with the ADQ capital and that the house’s “profitability is right in line with what we’ve seen in previous years.”

These figures are not representative of the house’s profits or staff as a whole; Kownator’s statement could not be independently verified by ARTnews.

One less visible factor contributing to the turnover numbers in most recent years was that unnamed key managers or immediate family members of the auction house were reported in the same filings to have purchased £65 million in art from Sotheby’s in 2020 and then £104.9 million in 2022—the same year that the collection of Harry and Linda Macklowe in New York was sold for a total of $922 million. That figure fell back down to £20 million in 2023.

Auction houses, like large-scale galleries such as Pace and David Zwirner, are owner-run, making it normal for shareholders to be behind multi-million-dollar art purchases for their personal collections. These figures contribute to overall sales turnover reported year-to-year.

The remaining board members are associated with Sotheby’s owner Altice Group. Arthur Clement Fernand Dreyfuss, the CEO of Altice France, and Dennis Lodewijk Okhuijsen, an advisers to Altice Europe and the telecom company’s European legal counsel, Natacha A. Marty, who is based in Switzerland.

The remaining board members are Charlie Stewart and Jean-Luc Berrebi, Sotheby’s current CEO and COO, serving alongside its owner Patrick Drahi.

Members of the nine-person board have voting power about the house’s financial decisions, and are detached from day-to-day operations. There are no art professionals on it, as has been typical of the board in the past. The company continues to maintain a separate non-voting collector-focused board, Sotheby’s international council.