CRACKING UP

Fabergé Egg-sperts Call Bullsh*t on Justice Department’s Russian Yacht Claim

One Russian art appraiser dismissed the suggestion that a lost egg might have been found as “Justice Department clickbait.”

Fabergé experts say they thought Justice Department claims that one of the lost jewel-encrusted eggs had been found on board a yacht seized from a Russian oligarch were a complete yolk. In July, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said agents “recovered a Fabergé—or alleged Fabergé—egg” on board the Amadea, a 300-foot yacht owned by billionaire Suleiman Kerimov and seized in Fiji. Just 45 of the treasured ornaments made by Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé are believed to exist, with the whereabouts of 43 accounted for. So experts were somewhat skeptical that one of the two missing eggs—now worth millions—could have been found in the possession of someone not known to be an art collector. “I just laughed,” Andre Ruzhnikov, a London-based Fabergé dealer, told The Wall Street Journal. Karen Kettering, a Russian-art appraiser, called the claim “Justice Department clickbait.” Sources familiar with the matter told the Journal that, after consulting experts, they determined that what they had found was unlikely to be the real deal.