CORDER’S COLUMN: Who knew what in the Speedygate scandal?

Cast your minds back to the Autumn of 2021. 

Covid fears were fading and retail sales for the hottest brands — Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Cartier, Tudor, Breitling — were rocketing.

The secondary market was on fire, with prices soaring for watches with the longest waiting lists.

Auction prices were at all-time highs, with artisan independents like F.P. Journe and Philippe Dufour particularly in demand.

It should have been a huge year for Omega. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics took place a year later than planned because of the pandemic, and Omega was there, as always, as official timekeeper.

2021’s blockbuster movie was also an Omega vehicle. No Time to Die, the final outing for Daniel Craig as James Bond, was a chance to push a special edition Seamaster.

But somehow Omega was rarely part of the conversation about the runaway recovery of the luxury Swiss watch industry.

Omega stores were well-stocked; arguably over-stocked.

Waiting lists were all-but non-existent, and most core collection watches could be bought at a discount on the secondary market.

This discounting is kryptonite to luxury brands, particularly when equivalent watches from Rolex — Submariners and Daytonas — were trading at multiples of their official retail prices.

Omega needed a statement win, and it emerged out of a clear blue sky when a Phillips auction in Geneva sold a 1957 Speedmaster CK2915-1 ‘grail watch’ for CHF 3,115,500 CHF (over $3 million), 30-times over its CHF 80,000-120,000 estimate.

It was the most expensive Omega ever sold, and analysts started to speculate about Omega’s rising collectability, which would likely translate into rising demand for its new watches, just as Rolex experienced after the sale of a Paul Newman Daytona for $18 million in 2017.

It is worth noting how much the trajectories of Omega and Rolex have changed since that 2017 sale.

In 2018, according to an annual Morgan Stanley report on the state of the Swiss watch industry, Rolex’s turnover was around CHF 5 billion, Omega’s around half that.

Fast-forward to 2022, and Rolex sales almost doubled to an estimated CHF 9.3 billion; Omega’s sales totalled CHF 2.5 billion, barely changed in five years.

As we now know, the Speedmaster CK2915-1 was a Frankenstein watch; assembled from components of various vintage watches.

And the origin of the watch? Omega, itself. Which experts authenticated the timepiece? The team at Omega. The winning bidder? That was Omega as well.

Three high-ranking Omega executives, one of them head of its Museum and heritage department, two others in the upper-echelons of its sales and retail operation, were fired by the company and face prosecution for fraud.

Even if the three do not end up in the dock, their reputations and careers are in ruins.

My question is whether these executives acted alone to cook up this extraordinary scandal, or was anybody else, even higher up the corporate food chain, involved?

There was motive, as I have outlined here, to hit a home run with the tropical dialed 1957 Speedmaster and, unless he was directly paid, the head of the Omega Museum had little to gain and everything to lose from orchestrating the fraud.

Cleaning up this mess cannot be left to Omega or its parent Swatch Group, it is a multimillion dollar fraud that must be a police matter.

I hope the authorities are thorough in their investigation; establishing not just what happened, but the names of everybody involved.

An original report into the questionable authenticity of the watch by Perezscope set this hare running.

National Swiss newspaper NZZ pushed Omega and Phillips into admitting what they knew about the fraud.

Now the police need to do their work to establish the full scale and breadth of the crime.