Georgina Adam reports on some simple sleuthing done by France’s auction oversight agency that reveals the Russian-owned auction house Phillips’s annual turnover which declined from 2012 to 2013:

The niche auction house Phillips had sales of $363m last year, according to the French auction regulator Conseil des Ventes. It establishes these figures by totting up all the firm’s sales, and it noted that turnover had shrunk by 5.2 per cent compared with 2012. I asked Phillips to confirm these figures, but the Russian-owned firm declined to comment.

The Art Market: Art crowd gather by the Gulf  (Financial Times)