Fabergé Museum

• Name — Fabergé Museum • Established — 15 May 2009 • Location — Baden-Baden, Germany • Collection Size — over 1,500 items • Founder — Alexander Ivanov • Website — www.faberge-museum.de

The most significant item in the museum's collection was the Rothschild Fabergé egg, which was made as an engagement gift from Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild to her brother's fiancée. Ivanov bought it at Christie's auction house in London on 28 November 2007, for £8 million (£8,980,500 including buyer's premium), almost $16.5 million at the time. On 8 December 2014, Russia's President Vladimir Putin gifted the Rothschild Fabergé egg to the Hermitage Museum on occasion of its 250th anniversary. Days before this gift was made, German customs officers, accompanied by British counterparts, raided the Fabergé Museum. Ivanov said that the officers' actions and its timing was politically motivated, coming amid tensions between the West and Russia, and hoping to ruin the publicly announced Hermitage gift ceremony and embarrass Russia's head of state. In reply, British investigators at the behest of UK's HM Revenue and Customs department, claimed that the museum had failed to pay nearly £70,000 in Value Added Tax (VAT) on artifacts purchased over the past 15 years at major auction houses in London. The raids were carried out with support from Germany's Financial Investigation and Customs Department. The museum denied the charges and declared that nothing incriminating was found during the operation. About the Rothschild Egg, when Ivanov bought the egg in London in 2007 he claimed a VAT refund of approximately £600,000 because he had the egg shipped to Russia, which exempted the purchase from EU tax, but investigators suspected it had been first transported to Germany. When investigators raided the museum, its director told them that the egg had been loaned to Baden-Baden briefly for an exhibition and then sent back to Moscow.

In January 2021, an art dealer specialized in Fabergé claimed in an open letter to the Hermitage Museum Mikhail Piotrovsky that a number of items (including five eggs) on display at the exhibition "Fabergé: Jeweller to the Imperial Court" (25 November 2020 – 14 March 2021), were fakes (so-called Fauxbergé). The scandal was echoed by the international press. Fabergé scholar Geza von Habsburg told the BBC regarding this issue: "Judging by the photographs and descriptions published online, all of the so-called 're-found Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs' from the museum in Baden-Baden displayed in this exhibition are fakes, in my opinion." Other leading Fabergé experts such as Alexander von Solodkoff and Ulla Tillander-Godenhielm also doubted its authenticity. At least 46 of the 91 items displayed in the Hermitage temporary exhibition came from the Fabergé Museum in Baden-Baden. According to the art dealer who uncovered the scandal, around 40% of 91 Fabergé items exhibited were counterfeits.