When Geneva-based jeweller Ronny Totah received an offer last November to view a rare Kashmir sapphire set for auction with an asking price of up to USD 12 million, his jaw dropped.
The large glimmering blue sapphire pictured in the prospective from the Phillips auction house was, he was convinced, a gem his company once owned before it was audaciously snatched from a Milan hotel nearly two decades earlier.
"I looked at the certificate, and I had this feeling. I said to myself: 'That's it. That's it'," he told AFP in an interview last week.
Also Read
The story reads like the plot of a mystery novel, with a multitude of twists and turns, a second disappearance and an as yet unresolved ending centred around a New York pawn shop.
It all started in 1996, when the Horovitz & Totah (H&T) jewellers had offered for auction a Cartier bracelet bearing a stunning 65.16-carat unheated Kashmir sapphire with an unusual elongated cushion-cut.
On November 14 that year, days before the anticipated sale in Geneva focused exclusively on Cartier jewels, auction house Antiquorum displayed the pieces at the Four Seasons hotel in Milan.
According to Swiss daily Le Temps, more than 50 people were in the viewing room when the bracelet, the main attraction of the show, vanished.
"It was terrible. It is always a shock when you get robbed," Totah said.
H&T's insurers dished out the USD 1.8 million -- the price they had expected to fetch at the time -- and Totah and his colleagues put the uncomfortable incident behind them.
Until November 8, 2015, when he received an email from Phillips offering a Geneva viewing of a 59.57-carat Kashmir Sapphire ahead of an auction in New York.
Totah did not view the stone, but studied the certificate carefully.
Considering "there are basically no stones with this origin, weight and shape out there ... It is "very, very, very probably" the stolen H&T sapphire, he said.
The fact that the gem in the prospectus was a little smaller than the one stolen 19 years earlier did not make Totah less suspicious, since jewel thieves will often file down a stone to alter its weight or shape.
He suggested the sapphire being offered by Phillips had been filed down to just under the 60-carat mark to make it less spectacular and noteworthy.
