Auction House Chief’s Price-Fixing Trial Wraps

The former chairman of Sotheby’s “watched from on high” as his subordinates carried out his orders to hatch a price-fixing scheme with Christie’s, cheating customers out of millions of dollars, a federal prosecutor said in closing arguments.

A. Alfred Taubman, 76, of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., has been on trial for three weeks on charges that he and Anthony Tennant, Christie’s chairman, stole as much as $400 million in commissions from sellers from 1993 to 1999.

Jury deliberations begin today.

Diana “Dede” Brooks, 51, Sotheby’s former chief executive, testified that the plot was conceived during a 1993 meeting in London at which Taubman and Tennant agreed they “were killing each other on the bottom line, and that it was time to do something about it.”