TheChek News Flow

Russians turn to 'personal shoppers' to smuggle luxury bags

Customs records show middlemen are keeping high-end fashion flowing to Moscow despite sanctions

Wealthy Russians are routinely sidestepping trade curbs on luxury brands, using a cottage industry of personal shoppers, resellers and cross-border smugglers to stay in step with the best of European fashion.

Instagram and the Telegram social media platform have filled with resellers catering to both large retailers and private buyers in Russia, promising a path to circumvent sanctions on expensive handbags and haute couture.

European luxury brands were hit with restrictions on sales into Russia after Vladimir Putin’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with the EU restricting legal sales to items valued at under €300.

Yet despite average prices for high-end fashion being well above the limit, Russians continue to sport latest western collections in Moscow, bought through a flourishing shadow supply chain. One buyer Lliyenish who has more than 10,000 followers on social media promises to source “anything on your wishlist” from the United Arab Emirates and Europe. Lliyenish did not respond to a request for comment.

Customs records indicate that sanctions curbs are diverting trade through resellers in third countries which do not apply any such restrictions. In September, for instance, a shipment of more than 300 Italian-made Bottega Veneta bags, priced at an average price of $1,800, was shipped into Russia from Dubai by a China-based reseller. Bottega did not respond to a request for comment.

Some brands and Russian importers have also adjusted their offerings to ensure items fall below the sanctions thresholds, according to analysts and customs data.

IBC Real Estate, a Moscow-based retail property consultancy, said about half of major western designer brands that were present in Russia at the start of 2020 are still available and are bringing new clothing lines into the country.

Middlemen saw business boom after sanctions came into force. From an apartment packed with luxury handbags, one buyer in Italy said he shipped 10 to 20 parcels to Russia each week, earning up to €6,000 per week in commission.

“The Italians don’t care,” said the buyer, who asked to be called Mikhail. “For them it is important to sell the product, and what happens to it later is our business.”

Mikhail, who before 2022 scouted the European market for clothing lines to launch in Russia, claims the destination of the goods he buys is an open secret. “Everyone knows me in these shops already, and they know my colleagues. Everyone knows very well where these clothes are going,” he said. 

Latvian customs officials told the Financial Times that they have, since the start of the year, rejected 60 shipments of luxury goods into Russia, many of which had an artificially low price marked on the customs declaration. Middlemen often try to disguise shipments as personal deliveries by, for example, taking tags off the bags.

Western brands can be liable for breaches of export controls if their products appear on the Russian market, regardless of the route into the country.

“In order to establish a defence you’d have to show that you didn’t know, and had no reasonable cause to suspect that the goods were ultimately destined for Russia,” said Gavin Irwin, a barrister at 2 Hare Court chambers. 

In some cases, the price thresholds have shaped decision-making.

FT analysis of Russian customs dockets shows that men’s suits sent to the country by the Italian company Canali were priced for wholesalers at an average of around €600 in the year before the outbreak of the war.

After sanctions hit, the unit price of almost all of the shipments dropped to just under the sanctions threshold of €300. This did not appear to reflect a general change in pricing strategy for the company: Canali suits declared on entry to India, for instance, show no such change.

A representative for Canali stated that they are “fully compliant with all applicable regulations”. Asked about their pricing strategy, they said pricing decisions are “highly confidential and commercially sensitive”. But, they added: “Prices have not fallen for Russian buyers.”

The company said that the price drop reflects that buyers in Russia “select and buy the items available to them, which are those that are able to be exported . . . at a price below the regulatory threshold”.

Some suits made by Canali are currently priced at Tsum, a major Moscow department store, at around Rbs170,000 (€1,600/$1,650).

Ekaterina Nogay, head of IBC Real Estate analytics department, said some other western brands were releasing “capsule collections” priced to meet the pricing requirements of selling in Russia.

“While perhaps not as obvious as export of western components used in Russian weapons, the export of luxury goods also plays an important role in buttressing Putin’s regime,” said Vitali Volovoi, researcher at Squeezing Putin, an organisation that tracks companies’ responses to Russia’s full-scale invasion, which first noted the shift in wholesale prices at Canali. 

“Any public cases of sanctions circumvention decrease the general leverage of sanctions against Russia, and help Putin’s regime build this narrative that they can still get access to brand new western products,” said Yuliia Pavytska, manager of sanctions programme at Kyiv School of Economics Institute.

One Russian, who asked not to be named, said export controls have only had an impact on middle class shoppers like her, who do not buy luxury often and now stopped completely due to the high mark-ups charged by resellers.  

“Rich Russians, who could easily afford it before, continue to get everything through fashion buyers, nothing has changed for them,” the 28-year-old web designer living in Moscow told the FT.

“I’ve always been trying to work more, to earn a little more to afford these luxuries, and with the war it feels like I have gone down a social class.”

Selon plusieurs légendes, Jésus aurait été un maître de sagesse, un gourou ayant marché de l’Himalaya à Bénarès, avant de revenir en Palestine, où sa vie nous est contée par les Evangiles. En ce matin de Noël, « Le Monde des religions » part sur les mystérieuses traces orientales du fondateur du christianisme.

Il existe, en Europe, toute une littérature faisant référence à un supposé séjour de Jésus aux Indes, au Cachemire et au Tibet, datant principalement de la fin du XIXe siècle. Une légende qui illustre la perception paradoxale que l’Occident a de l’Orient, faite de répulsion-domination et de fascination-séduction. Le premier aspect s’est exprimé économiquement et militairement : occupation de l’Inde et de la Chine, création des « compagnies des Indes » par les Occidentaux, racisme colonial…

En même temps, l’Orient fascine : terre de spiritualité, ses langues, tel le sanskrit, exercent une formidable attraction, car elles sont considérées comme les langues originelles. Ce contexte général favorisa l’émergence, en Occident, du mythe d’un Jésus d’Orient. Avec la science moderne, la philosophie des Lumières et la sécularisation, les Eglises ne peuvent plus prétendre au monopole du sens et de la vérité. Leur emprise sur la société se desserre…

Mais la soif spirituelle ne s’apaise pas pour autant : elle se métamorphose, devenant moins ecclésiale, moins dogmatique. Même les Eglises connaissent leurs « modernistes », leurs « libéraux ». Une aubaine pour l’ésotérisme, qui va ainsi enfanter une littérature marquée par l’Orient. C’est dans ce creuset ésotérique que la légende est née.

Jésus, une incarnation du dieu Krishna ?

L’occultiste et écrivain français Louis Jacolliot (1837-1890), qui aurait vécu quelques années en Inde, y exerçant le métier de juge, fut le précurseur de cette légende. Il a consacré une part de ses travaux à la mythologie indienne. Sa Bible dans l’Inde (1869), coup de tonnerre dans la pensée religieuse de l’époque, interrogeait le silence des Evangiles à propos de la vie de Jésus entre 12 et 30 ans. Il s’exclame ainsi : « Et la vérité est que le Christ, pendant cette période, étudia en Egypte, et peut-être même dans l’Inde, les livres sacrés, réservés depuis des siècles aux initiés… » La « révolution accomplie » par Jésus et ses disciples fut possible « grâce aux livres sacrés de l’Inde ». Jésus-Christ serait même une incarnation « chrétienne » du dieu Krishna, fils d’une divinité de l’Inde, né lui aussi d’une vierge. L’Eglise mettra évidemment le livre à l’index.

Mais Jacolliot influencera la théosophe russe Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891). Dans Isis dévoilée (1877) et La Doctrine secrète (1888), elle brosse le portrait d’un Jésus proche de la secte juive des esséniens, dont elle nous dit qu’ils furent des « convertis, missionnaires bouddhistes ». Le « réformateur nazaréen » prêchait alors « la philosophie du Bouddha-Sâkyamouni ». Pour elle, Jésus était « au pied de l’Himalaya plutôt qu’au pied du Sinaï », car son éthique était bien plus proche des doctrines de Manu (grand législateur indien, auteur des Lois de Manu, un traité du IIe siècle avant notre ère environ) et de Gautama (nom du Bouddha historique), que de Yahvé, le dieu vengeur de l’Ancien Testament.

Avec le Russe Nicolas Notovitch (1858-1916), la thèse d’un séjour de Jésus en Orient prend de l’ampleur. Juif devenu chrétien orthodoxe, Notovitch fut un infatigable arpenteur de l’Asie. Il se serait rendu au monastère tibétain de Himis, dans le Ladakh, et y aurait trouvé rien de moins qu’un manuscrit relatant le séjour de Jésus dans le pays. Sa Vie méconnue de Jésus-Christ (1894) reprend les informations qu’il prétend avoir glanées dans ce texte rédigé en pali et en tibétain.

On y apprend ainsi que les Tibétains connaissent Jésus sous le nom d’Issa. Serait-ce une influence de l’islam et de la langue arabe, largement présents en Asie centrale et orientale ? En effet, Issa (ou Aïssa) est le nom arabe de Jésus. Quoi qu’il en soit, un lama aurait expliqué à Notovitch qu’Issa est un « grand prophète, l’un des premiers après les vingt-deux Bouddhas », et « plus grand qu’aucun de tous les dalaï-lamas ». Des milliers de rouleaux le mentionneraient.

Le supérieur du monastère de Himis aurait précisé qu’Issa était un bouddha « qui prêcha la doctrine sainte dans l’Inde et chez les fils d’Israël ». Le manuscrit rapporté par Notovitch donne les informations suivantes : « Lorsque l’enfant sacré eut atteint un certain âge, on l’emmena aux Indes où, jusqu’à l’âge d’homme, il étudia toutes les lois du grand Bouddha qui réside éternellement dans le ciel. »

« Supercherie littéraire ! »

Jésus aurait donc quitté Jérusalem pour se rendre, vers 13 ou 14 ans, aux Indes, par les portes du Sindh (aujourd’hui au Pakistan). Les « prêtres blancs de Brama » lui auraient transmis les enseignements des Veda, la guérison par la prière, l’art d’éloigner l’esprit malin. Mais Jésus développa son propre message, hétérodoxe par rapport à l’hindouisme, car il enseignait – à Bénarès, au Népal ou dans les montagnes de l’Himalaya – aux basses castes, les exhortant à refuser le culte des idoles, contestant même l’autorité des brahmanes et des kshatriyas – occupant la seconde place dans la hiérarchie des castes après les brahmanes, les kshatriyas ont en principe le monopole du pouvoir politique et militaire.

Puis, Jésus quitta l’Inde pour la Perse, tout en continuant sa prédication. A l’âge de 29 ans, il était de retour dans son pays natal. Là, les rédacteurs des Evangiles prennent le relais de l’histoire du Christ, jusqu’au procès et à la crucifixion.

Dès sa sortie, le livre de Notovitch suscita des réactions hostiles : « Supercherie littéraire ! », crient de nombreux auteurs, dans des cercles catholiques (Giovannini R., 1894), rabbiniques (Deutsch G., 1896) mais aussi théosophiques (Mead G., 1894). L’orientaliste Max Müller (1823-1900), grand traducteur de textes orientaux, affirme également n’avoir jamais entendu parler de ce manuscrit de Himis.

Mais le débat est lancé. Des voyageurs passés par le monastère disent confirmer son inexistence. L’écrivain russe, sans remettre en cause son récit, nuance ses propos dans les éditions ultérieures, précisant qu’il s’est basé sur des notices fragmentaires. Le supérieur tibétain de Himis aurait, quant à lui, selon certaines auteurs de l’époque, nié la véracité du récit…

Pourtant, malgré ces réfutations, la légende du séjour asiatique de Jésus se prolongera tout au long du XXe siècle. Le peintre et théosophe russe Nicolas Roerich (1874-1947), qui visitera le Tibet à la fin des années 1920, aurait partagé cette croyance. Citons également L’Evangile du Verseau de Jésus le Christ (1908), de l’Américain Levi H. Dowling (1844-1911), qui, lui aussi, nous parle des années indiennes et tibétaines de Jésus.

Et le mythe prend un nouvel élan lorsqu’un hindou, disciple direct de Ramakrishna et proche de Vivekananda – éminents maîtres spirituels des XIXe-XXe siècles –, Swami Abhedananda (1866-1939), prétend, à son tour, avoir vu le manuscrit de Himis en 1922, qui fut intégré à son livre Journey into Kashmir and Tibet, publié à Calcutta.

Une légende présente dans l’hindouisme et en islam

Le mystère de ce manuscrit, dont plus personne ne verra la trace après Abhedananda (certains le disent disparu après un pillage du monastère par les communistes chinois en 1950…), perdurera. En 2011, l’éditeur allemand Norbert Klatt y consacre un ouvrage, Jesus in Indien, suggérant qu’il s’agissait peut-être de restes d’une Vie de Jésus écrite par les Frères moraves, un groupe missionnaire originaire de Bohème, présent dans la région. Peut-être n’a-t-il tout simplement jamais existé.

Quoi qu’il en soit, la légende du Jésus indien ou tibétain circulera jusqu’à nos jours dans divers courants de l’ésotérisme moderne et du New Age, du Livre d’Urantia (ouvrage ésotérique publié en 1955, dont le but est d’« étendre la conscience cosmique et la spiritualité de notre planète ») jusqu’aux explorations des annales akashiques (concept ésotérique créé par les théosophes à la fin du XIXe siècle, postulant l’existence d’une mémoire cosmique enregistrant les événements du monde) par les écrivains Daniel Meurois et Anne Givaudan…

A noter également que des traces de la légende du Jésus indien se retrouvent dans la littérature hindoue, dans un passage – à l’authenticité fortement discutée – du Bhavishya Purana, un texte sacré datant, au moins, du VIe siècle. Certains interprètes voient, en effet, Jésus dans le « Mlechha » (non-Indien) nommé Isha Putra (« fils de Dieu »), né d’une femme célibataire nommée Kumari, et dont le texte relate la rencontre avec le roi indien Shalivahana (ayant pourtant vécu à la fin du premier siècle et au début du deuxième… après Jésus-Christ).

On trouve également écho de cette légende dans l’ahmadisme, un courant musulman né au Pakistan à fin du XIXe siècle, tirant son nom du réformateur Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Selon lui, Jésus a bien été crucifié à Jérusalem, mais il ne serait pas mort. Blessé, il aurait été transporté à Srinagar, dans le Cachemire, où il serait mort à l’âge de 120 ans. Les ahmadis se considèrent ainsi comme les gardiens de la tombe du Christ, Roza Bal, une bâtisse rectangulaire devenue lieu de pèlerinage.

Nous sommes, quoi qu’il en soit, assez loin de ce que l’on sait du Jésus historique, au sujet duquel les avancées de la recherche contemporaine tendent davantage à souligner la judéité que l’indianité, mais aussi du Christ vénéré par les chrétiens en tant que fils de Dieu porteur du salut par la croix : avec le mythe indo-tibétain, Jésus devient un instructeur, porteur d’un enseignement secret, un maître de sagesse.

The giant data centers behind AI models and crypto farms consume so much power that they will require every possible source of electricity generation, including renewables such as solar and wind, industry executives say.

Data centers put unique stress on the power grid by sucking up energy around the clock on top of short bursts of even more electricity. A new breed of giant data centers each need as much energy as a midsize city.

“We already don’t have enough electricity to meet the demands of these server farms, whether it’s AI or crypto,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R., N.D.), who has discussed energy strategy with Trump and his advisers.

That is why the U.S. needs as much energy as it can generate including from renewables and fossil fuels, Cramer said. He supports former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican and Trump’s pick for interior secretary who is slated to head the White House’s National Energy Council.

Investors are buying shares of power companies to bet on rising demand from data centers and the all-sources strategy. An exchange-traded fund tracking big utilities has risen more than 20% this year, the second time in the past decade it has climbed that much.

Natural gas and renewables will continue to account for the bulk of new electricity generation, utility executives say. A gusher of solar and wind projects waiting to connect to the power grid likely represent the fastest path to raise electricity demand. New nuclear plants some technology giants are considering would take a decade or more to construct.

“Renewables are poised to supply immediately what no one else can do, and that growth will be explosive,” said Sheldon Kimber, chief executive of renewable-energy developer Intersect Power.

Intersect recently said it would join with Google and investment company TPG on renewable-power and battery-storage projects for data centers. The companies are targeting $20 billion in investments by the end of the decade.

Technology behemoths driving AI, including Google and Microsoft, have made ambitious pledges to cut carbon emissions. The companies are plowing billions of dollars into zero-carbon energy sources such as nuclear and geothermal power from under the earth’s surface.

“The demand swell that’s unfolding is really going to push and advance a lot of clean-energy technologies,” said Chase Lochmiller, CEO of Crusoe, a startup that aims to power data centers and AI infrastructure with clean energy. Crusoe recently raised $600 million from investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Nvidia and Fidelity.

The likelihood that Trump could inadvertently trigger a surge of investment into clean energy runs counter to fears the sector is in for a reckoning. Trump has vowed to pull out of the Paris climate accord, as he did during his first term. The U.S. rejoined under President Biden.

Trump has said he wants to repeal Biden’s 2022 climate law. But the law has bipartisan support in Congress. Trump has criticized wind energy and electric vehicles, though he softened his stance on EVs after Tesla CEO Elon Musk began backing his campaign.

In a post announcing he was naming venture capitalist and Musk ally David Sacks as AI and crypto “czar,” Trump said the two industries are “critical to the future of American competitiveness.” Trump has said increasing energy production would be key to winning the AI arms race with China and other countries.

He has also proposed accelerated permitting for companies that invest more than $1 billion in the U.S., which would give a boost to clean-power efforts such as transmission lines across states.

After the election, OpenAI, the maker of the popular ChatGPT chatbot, put out an “infrastructure blueprint” for the U.S. that included streamlined state and federal permitting for solar, wind and nuclear projects as well as a law to speed transmission and gas pipeline construction.

Tech and energy executives say they need such projects to meet U.S. electricity demand that is forecast to increase nearly 16% by 2029, according to consulting firm Grid Strategies. “We’re going to need every kind of resource that’s ready and able to get built,” said Shashank Sane, who leads energy developer Invenergy’s transmission business.

The company is working on a giant transmission project to carry wind and solar power from Kansas to Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. The Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office recently said it would lend Invenergy nearly $5 billion for phase one of the project taking power from Kansas to Missouri.

The data-center frenzy is also fueling investment in new natural-gas gas plants. Facebook parent Meta Platforms recently said it would spend $10 billion on a data center in Louisiana, prompting the utility Entergy to build three new gas plants and new solar and battery storage projects.

“I can’t think of a time that the gas business has had more fun than they’re having right now,” Scott Strazik, CEO of gas turbine maker GE Vernova, said recently.

How a new wave of homeownership is helping to revive the city’s residential sector

New Venice resident Tommaso Calabro has a few confessions to make.

At the end of 2023, the 34-year-old art-gallery owner moved into a 14th-century palazzo in Venice’s central San Polo district, but he seldom cooks in his cozy kitchen, restored by a previous owner. And just about the last place he goes is at the top of the list of millions of Venice’s annual visitors—Piazza San Marco, where the traffic of day trippers has all but replaced the square’s once-iconic pigeon flocks.

“I am rarely in San Marco,” says Calabro, who paid $4.38 million in late 2023 for a 5,600-square-foot portion of the palazzo, which he has divided up into a high-ceilinged gallery space and a sprawling upper-floor, two-bedroom apartment. Instead, he says, he prefers Zattere, at the lower edge of the historic center, where the spectacular light reflecting off the wide Giudecca Canal reminds him of classic Venetian paintings. “It’s my favorite part of Venice,” he says of an area that many tourists miss entirely.

Calabro, who currently divides his time between Venice and Milan, where his gallery has another branch, is part of a new wave of second-home buyers reinvigorating historic Venice’s residential sector.

Ordinary daily life in the heart of Venice has taken a major hit over the last several decades. According to statistics from the city of Venice, the historic center’s permanent population has dropped from a post-war high of just under 175,000 in 1951 to just below 50,000 in 2023—the lowest point, by some estimates, since the Middle Ages. Former residents, relocating to less expensive and more convenient homes on the mainland, have been fleeing soaring tourist numbers, high real-estate prices, and mounting threats of periodic flooding, says Jacopo Galli, a professor of architectural design at Università Iuav di Venezia, who is affiliated with the Venice Sustainability Foundation, a public-private initiative researching ways to promote residential growth in the city.

Services that Italians expect in their daily lives, says Galli, such as easy access to ordinary food markets and a variety of specialty shops, are “just no longer present” in parts of the city, he says, citing in particular the area around Piazza San Marco.

Now, longtime Venice watchers are hoping that recent second-home buyers, whose numbers have spiked in the wake of the pandemic, can give their corners of historic Venice a newfound lived-in feeling.

Jane da Mosto moved to Venice from the U.K. in the mid-1990s. She is co-founder and executive director of We Are Here Venice, a local NGO that is trying to protect the city against the economic and environmental onslaughts of mass tourism, and she says the city’s growing numbers of second-home owners “are potentially a really important resource for Venice,” because they are true residents, rather than mere visitors or speculators. Servane Giol, a France-born author who moved to the city 25 years ago, likes to call this conspicuous crop “the new Venetians.”

Venice native Stefano Campostrini is a statistician who has studied demographic trends in and around the historic center. A professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Campostrini says you don’t need to be a full-time resident, let alone a native, to help revive the city’s beleaguered residential situation, which has been harmed by short-term vacation rentals, the proliferation of businesses catering almost exclusively to day tourists, and a high vacancy rate.

Some of the outer areas of the historic city, where more modest worker housing was built, feel almost derelict. Campostrini says that up to 20% of Venetian residential units are likely just sitting empty, with owners either unwilling to renovate or just biding their time while waiting for prices to go even higher. Second-home buyers, though their base may be elsewhere, can help to restore a residential character to certain parts of the city, says Campostrini.

Tommaso Calabro bought his palace complex from the owner of a foundation, who used it for exhibits, and he now makes his home, for at least part of every week, in what was previously a pied-à-terre used intermittently by a foundation officer. “To be Venetian doesn’t mean your family has been here for centuries,” says Campostrini, citing the Venetian Republic’s tradition, nearly unique in Italy, of welcoming resident foreign colonies during its heyday in the 13th and 16th centuries. Over time, these former foreigners became fully incorporated into Venetian life. “You can become Venetian,” he says.

While there are no reliable statistics tracking second-home ownership in Venice, ballooning numbers of second-home sales at local real-estate agencies testify to the trend. Serena Bombassei, owner and managing director of Venice Real Estate/Knight Frank, says that growth in interest from second-home buyers at her agency has increased at a rate of at least 10% annually since 2022. The new arrivals are willing to put up with the exotic hassles of renovating centuries-old homes, often built on wooden piles and accessible only by canal, to fulfill what are typically longstanding dreams of living in the traffic-free city of legendary beauty.

Marty Saggese, executive director of a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization, first visited Venice in 1987, and “it was my favorite place in the world since then.” Now 66, he decided to buy a vacation home here just after the pandemic, and he found an unusual two-bedroom duplex near Zattere, with a massive kitchen custom-built by the previous owner, a professional chef. He paid $626,000 in 2023, and plans to spend an additional $62,000 on a renovation that will replace worn-out wooden floors, expose ceiling beams, and update lighting.

Among his own Venetian-style roadblocks in turning the loft space, likely once a wash house for a nearby palazzo, into a new home: approvals from three separate planning commissions that have postponed closing by well over a year. Saggese’s architect, Venetian native Giovanni Rubin de Cervin Albrizzi, says delays were in part caused by Saggese’s conversion of a previously commercial space into residential use. While waiting to close, Saggese has been renting the unit from the seller.

Saggese’s home is in the district of Dorsoduro, which runs along the bottom of the historic center. At its outer tip, along the Grand Canal, the district has lost many ordinary shops and can resemble a resort more than a city. Deeper into Dorsoduro, there is a residual and even vibrant residential feel, with neighborhood butchers, hardware stores, and fresh produce sold from canal barges—which is Saggese’s favorite way to shop.

Local business owners in the heart of Dorsoduro concur on the uptick of second-home owners. “That side has really picked up since 2021,” says Giuseppe Baldan, owner of Club Delfino, a neighborhood gym, who now counts a growing number of new Venetians working out alongside his native-Venetian regulars.

Local, a one-star Michelin restaurant with a $200 nine-course menu, has begun to notice second-home owners among its recurring clientele. “This is a trend we have definitely noticed since the pandemic,” says owner Benedetta Fullin, adding that “French, English and Americans are the nationalities that we see doing it the most.”

Fortuny is the home-furnishings label based on the island of Giudecca, just across from Zattere. The company’s co-owner and creative director, Mickey Riad, says new second-home owners have helped Fortuny to double Venice-based sales in the last few years.

Venice has six historic districts, or sestieri, and a few in particular are noted for maintaining a strong residential character, including Castello, which extends eastward from San Marco. “It’s still all Venetian here,” says Argentine-American architect Emilio Ambasz, who has used a portion of an 18th-century Castello palazzo as his Venice base since the mid-1980s.

Ambasz has put his four-story, eight-bedroom landmark, totaling nearly 14,000 square feet, on the market, with an asking price of $14.6 million. Venice Sotheby’s International Realty has the listing.

Ambasz says he is considering including the décor in the sale for an additional $8.34 million.

Barbara Da Rin, of Bologna’s Nomisma, an economic-research company that evaluates the real-estate sector, says Venice prices are down somewhat since prepandemic levels. Still, the city is one of Italy’s most expensive, with average premium prices now coming in third, behind Milan and Rome. Real-estate professionals attribute these high prices to investors eager to buy up and convert residential units to short-term vacation rentals, which the Venice city government—unlike those of other major tourist destinations in Europe, such as Amsterdam and Barcelona—has been slow to regulate.

Venice Real Estate/Knight Frank has listed a recently restored duplex, centered on the prime floor, or piano nobile, of a 16th-century palazzo, for $10.23 million. The extravagant two-bedroom, right on the Grand Canal, has a view of the Rialto Bridge—once associated with the city’s local fish market and now a prime spot for selfies.

Even wealthy Venetians are largely priced out of the luxury market in the historic center, says Michelangelo Ravagnan, the agent who sold Calabro his gallery complex. Ravagnan, a native Venetian himself, says Venetians willing to spend more than around $1.5 million are inclined to head to the Lido, the outer island known for its Art Nouveau villas, beaches and car access. He says buyers dedicated to staying in the historic center might opt for a unit in Cannaregio, another sestiere with a residential feel, where his agency has a 2,580-square-foot, three-bedroom triplex listed for $1.2 million.

Staying put in the historic center might come at a price, but it means “living the Venetian life,” says Campostrini.

Elite Colleges Have a Looming Money Problem

Trump policies and high costs could make coming years a financial challenge for Harvard and other Ivies

They gave it the old college try, but America’s elite universities are facing money problems partly of their own creation.

It might not seem that way compared with the broader world of U.S. higher education. Ivy League institutions and a handful in a similar orbit like Stanford, Duke and the University of Chicago aren’t just blessed to have international cachet and their pick of excellent students and professors—they also have the most money and the richest alumni. By contrast, public and especially smaller private colleges and universities are cutting staff and programs. Many are closing outright.

A school like Harvard, now well into its fourth century, will almost certainly survive for a fifth one. But there are financial problems below the surface that could emerge if the bull market stumbles and especially if some proposed Trump administration policies are enacted.

Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment is so huge that the difference between a good and a so-so investment performance translates to sums that would dwarf most colleges’ entire nest eggs. Former Harvard President and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers estimated this year that if Harvard had been able to just keep up with other Ivies and “large endowment schools” in the past several years, it would have $20 billion more. For perspective, he says that just $1 billion could fund 100 professorships or permanently cover tuition for 100 students.

But even Harvard’s peer group isn’t doing as well as it could. Veteran investment consultant Richard Ennis wrote this month that high costs and “outdated perceptions of superiority” have stymied Ivy League endowment returns, which could have been worth 20% more since the 2008 financial crisis if invested in a classic stock and bond mix. Harvard has more than three-quarters of its endowment in private equity, hedge funds or real estate and just 14% in publicly traded stocks. Harvard Management Company doesn’t break out fees in its reports and a spokesman didn’t provide that information, but Ennis estimates that the all-in cost of management for such assets is easily 3%, which is a gigantic drag.

Expenses aren’t the only issue. During the financial crisis, when donations plunged and costs rose, Harvard also faced steep investment losses and collateral calls on derivatives. With some investments hard to sell and money already committed to the university, HMC had to exit some stakes at distressed prices and the university was forced to postpone capital projects and borrow to cover the shortfall.

Today it doesn’t face the same derivatives exposure, but private-equity values could be more theoretical than real if it had to sell swiftly. More liquid investments have other advantages. Last year the university relied on the endowment for 37% of its budget, up from about a fifth of the budget 20 years ago and far higher than the average across private, not-for-profit colleges. This comes as gifts have been less abundant. Despite a booming stock market, Harvard said alumni donations fell by 15% last fiscal year amid outrage over the university’s handling of campus antisemitism. Fellow Ivies Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania experienced even steeper drops.

Two Trump administration policies could further weigh on Ivies’ finances. One is a 1.4% tax on income levied as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on endowments larger than $500,000 per student at schools with more than 500 students. A few dozen schools have had to pay it and there is talk of increasing the levy.

Far costlier would be rhetoric or visa rules that make it harder or less attractive for foreign students to attend U.S. universities. Foreign students on average receive much less assistance and therefore indirectly subsidize aid to domestic students. Their enrollment took a hit during Trump’s first term.

Even if foreign students aren’t made to feel unwelcome, economic policies that have boosted the value of the dollar relative to foreign currencies could make already expensive U.S. colleges, with a total cost of attendance approaching $100,000 a year before aid, unattractive relative to European, British or Australian universities.

Domestic demographics won’t help. Paul Weinstein Jr. of the Progressive Policy Institute writes that, starting next year, colleges will face an “enrollment cliff” that will see them lose 575,000 students over four years. Yet a booming stock market and competition for student tuition dollars has led to massive growth in university bureaucracies far exceeding tenured staff hires. More than three million people are employed by four-year colleges and Weinstein notes that some actually have more non-faculty employees than students, including Duke and Caltech.

The more elite the college, the less they will suffer from a drop in overall U.S. enrollment. Harvard alone, for example, rejected more than 50,000 students last year—enough to populate several less-prestigious colleges’ freshman classes. A drop in stocks, or a reckoning that reveals their opaque private-equity funds aren’t as valuable as they look on paper, would leave a mark, though.

Retrenchment in industry has led to concerns about the spread of ‘pharmacy deserts’ with limited access to medicines

American drugstores are disappearing from street corners, with big chains Walgreens and CVS closing hundreds of locations and independent pharmacies struggling to survive. 

The reshaping of a ubiquitous part of the retail landscape reflects gathering pressures inside stores.

At the rear of the store, business at pharmacy counters is being squeezed by stingier drug reimbursement rates and pharmacist wages. In the aisles, sales of everything from greeting cards to cosmetics are feeling the effects of cut-price competition.

CVS, the largest pharmacy chain by store count, has shut 900 stores in the past three years and intends to close another 270 in 2025. Walgreens has shrunk its US footprint by 1,000 stores in the past six years and plans to pull the plug on as many as 1,300 more in the next three years. Smaller rival Rite Aid exited bankruptcy proceedings in September offering dozens of surplus properties for lease. 

Wall Street has taken a dim view of pharmacy operators’ prospects, with shares of parent companies CVS Health down more than 40 per cent and Walgreens Boots Alliance off more than 60 per cent in 2024. 

“The whole drugstore four-wall economic model is collapsing on itself, in my opinion,” said Josh Cummings, a portfolio manager at Janus Henderson Investors. 

Retrenchment among US drugstores has also sent ripples through commercial property markets and caused public health officials to worry about the spread of “pharmacy deserts” — areas without convenient access to medicines — often in poor urban and rural areas.

Drugstores received a boost as testing and vaccination hubs during the Covid-19 pandemic. But as the disease’s virulence fades, structural problems have re-emerged for the nation’s pharmacies. 

Dispensing prescription drugs is a $621bn business, according to the Drug Channels Institute, and it drives about three-quarters of US pharmacy sales. The profitability of the business depends on a complex web of payments involving patients, pharmacies, drug wholesalers and health insurance intermediaries known as pharmacy benefit managers. 

The benefit managers have for years pushed for lower reimbursements paid out to pharmacies for the prescriptions they fill, said Elizabeth Anderson, analyst at Evercore ISI. This has continually reduced Walgreens’ gross profit margin by more than half a percentage point each year, she said. 

Drugstores also have relatively high labour costs with pharmacists who can earn more than $125,000 a year, Anderson said. Pharmacists, complaining of pressure to boost sales, have been organising a labour union. 

Chain drugstores expanded aggressively early in the century through construction and acquisition, leaving more than 60,000 pharmacies across the country.

“I think most of us knew . . . that retail pharmacy was largely overbuilt for where the future was going to be, particularly given the possibility of technology, home delivery and so forth,” Tim Wentworth, chief executive of Walgreens, said in June. Walgreens Boots Alliance, which also owns UK pharmacy chain Boots, is now in talks to sell itself to private equity firm Sycamore Partners.

CVS Health, the parent of the namesake pharmacy chain, also has an in-house benefit manager, shielding itself from a portion of drug reimbursement pressures. But it still must negotiate with outside managers as well. 

CVS pointed to factors including population shifts, consumer buying patterns and pharmacy density to inform decisions to shut stores. Even as it closes hundreds of stores next year, it plans to open almost 30 new locations, including some inside of Target, the mass merchandiser where CVS already operates pharmacies. 

“We’re closing locations strategically to better meet consumers’ health, wellness and pharmacy care needs — as announced more than three years ago — not in reaction to industry pressures,” CVS said. 

Drugstores have long competed with pharmacies housed in supermarkets and at Walmart, the US retail giant. The latter intends to launch same-day home medicine delivery nationwide by the end of January.

Amazon, which purchased online pharmacy PillPack in 2018, is also rolling out same-day drug deliveries to almost half the country in 2025. “We’re building a modern pharmacy; what we like to think of as a pharmacy in your pocket,” Hannah McClellan, vice-president of operations, product and technology at Amazon Pharmacy, said at a press briefing earlier this year. 

Drugstores also face intensifying competition at the “front of store”, where items as varied as over-the-counter medicines, toothpaste, snacks and stationery are sold — usually at higher prices. Some products are locked behind plastic to deter theft, creating an inconvenience that can curtail sales. 

“The pricing is a lot more competitive at Amazon or even a grocery store or mass merchandiser, and they really haven’t done much to improve their value positioning,” said Mike Blackburn, an executive vice-president at RetailStat, a retail industry research company. 

The number of pharmacies peaked in the middle of the past decade at about 66,000, according to a study published this month in the journal Health Affairs. There was considerable turmoil in the sector, however: of pharmacies that operated at any point in the previous decade, 29 per cent had closed by 2021, according to Dima Qato, one of the study’s authors. 

The National Community Pharmacists Association, an Alexandria, Virginia-based trade group, estimated that independent community pharmacies totalled 18,984 locations in June, down from 19,432 the year before. 

“I don’t know how this is going to shake out, to be honest,” said Christine Mastandrea, chief operating officer at Whitestone Reit, a commercial landlord with tenants that include Walgreens. “I know a lot of corners are going to go for sale.”

Eni fires up €100mn supercomputer in race to find oil and gas reservoirs

Italian energy giant switches on the world’s most powerful machine outside the US

Italian energy giant Eni is firing up the world’s most powerful supercomputer outside the US this Christmas as it races rivals to build the technology infrastructure needed to better explore for new sources of oil and gas.

Built at a cost of more than €100mn, Eni’s new machine, HPC6, will be switched on in the small Italian town of Ferrera Erbognone, population 1,140. It contains almost 14,000 AMD graphics processing units: high-powered chips used to perform complex calculations and run artificial intelligence processes.

The supercomputer took fifth place in an annual list of the world’s fastest computers last month with a benchmark speed of 477 petaflops per second, behind three US research computers and Microsoft’s cloud-based Eagle computer. 

Its job will be to crunch data to discover new oil and gas reservoirs, as well as to perform calculations to advance clean energy. 

Lorenzo Fiorillo, the head of Eni’s research and digital department, said the computer was almost nine times faster than its predecessor and that Eni was one of the few oil companies that has kept building its own machines, rather than switching to buying cloud computing services. 

“A lot of the other companies realised it would be more efficient to rent time on someone else’s supercomputer,” said Rob West, an analyst at Thunder Said Energy, adding that Exxon, Shell and Chevron had used supercomputers at the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

Eni’s supercomputing division has helped the Italian company burnish its reputation for oil and gas exploration. “We were able to find oil in places where we saw nothing,” said Fiorillo. He noted that as well as computing power, Eni had built significant capability in coding the algorithms for HPC6 to run. “We started producing our own code in the 1980s,” said Fiorillo. 

“We have used the supercomputer in all of our latest discoveries,” he added, saying that extreme computing power helped Eni navigate the so-called pre-salt layer, a series of geological formations beneath thick layers of salt on both sides of the south Atlantic. “Our algorithms can create clear images of where the oil is and how big it is,” he said.  

While oil companies have been using supercomputers to interpret seismic data and model the behaviour of oil and gas reservoirs for years, they are now also increasingly using AI to do everything from creating digital twins of their assets to generating hundreds of different options for how to drill oilfields and where to place their wells.

Fiorillo said that his research team now spent 70 per cent of its time on clean energy and that HPC6 would be used to research how to manage plasma clouds in nuclear fusion reactors for discovering new materials; to increase the efficiency of devices that capture carbon emissions; and to work out how to make better solar panels. 

The company declined to comment on whether supercomputers would soon be overshadowed by giant computing systems, such as the Colossus data centre created by Elon Musk in Memphis, Tennessee. But it said its own data centre in Ferrera Erbognone, just over 25 miles south-west of Milan, was “well-positioned for upcoming expansions”. 

Chess champion Magnus Carlsen leads gambit to capture ancient game

Norwegian fronts F1-inspired Freestyle Chess league that aims to exploit ‘massive untapped potential’

Magnus Carlsen has a vision to transform the ancient game of chess. The grandmaster, a contender to be the greatest player in history, is convinced that a revamped version complete with heart rate monitors and “confession” booths can win over new fans as well as devotees, insisting there is “massive untapped potential”.

The Norwegian, the world’s highest-rated chess player, has joined forces with German technology investor Jan Buettner and New York-based Left Lane Capital to launch a league that takes inspiration from sports such as Formula 1 motor racing.

He and fellow competitors in the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour will compete under a version of the game that randomises the starting position of the kings, queens, bishops, knights and rooks so as to prioritise creativity and intelligence over memorised lines of play.

“We inherently believe this is a better game than what we’ve been playing in classical chess,” Carlsen told the Financial Times. “A lot of people who are in gaming feel that having a new map for every game is tremendously exciting.”

The heart rate monitors will reveal the stress levels endured by players, while confession booth-style interviews will follow a similar format to those used in reality television shows.

The competition, which gets under way at Buettner’s German estate in February before moving on to Paris, New York, Delhi and Cape Town, is a play for a global online chess audience that has boomed since the pandemic. The profile of chess was raised by the success of The Queen’s Gambit, a Netflix series released in 2020 that tells the story of a fictional female prodigy.

Left Lane has invested $12mn, an example of how investors are trying to bring new business models and competition formats to sport in search of returns.

“You obviously have the GOAT [greatest of all time] in Magnus, which is a magnet for the best players in the world,” said Harley Miller, a Left Lane managing partner. “When you have the best players in the world, it allows you to think about distribution and the audience from the outset.”

Miller acknowledged that the league would not be “immediately profitable”, but that the aim was to increase revenues from sponsorship, ticketing, hospitality and hosting fees.

To achieve this, Freestyle Chess are seeking to reimagine the board game as a “media event” along the lines of a F1 race or a professional basketball match, with the idea of building a season-long narrative for fans to follow, according to a presentation shared with the FT.

Elevating the profile of the players is key to those ambitions. “What makes F1 so exciting is the context, the colour codes of the drivers, the back stories, the personal stories of these people,” Buettner said.

Freestyle Chess will prioritise reaching viewers and not place itself behind a paywall for now, according to Buettner, although media rights deals could follow “when we have enough distribution”. Chess.com is its biggest distributor at present, he added. The prize fund for each of the first three events will be $750,000, subsequently rising to $1mn.

Carlsen’s backing is significant because he is the highest-profile player in the sport. He sat out of this year’s classical world championship, organised by governing body Fide, a crown he held for 10 years until he relinquished it in 2023 after growing exasperated with the format.

But he was in Singapore to promote Freestyle Chess before 18-year old Indian Gukesh Dommaraju took the world title. Dommaraju will join the new league.

Carlsen picked up on the aim of the competition’s backers to “make the chess players into race car drivers”, saying it was “definitely something we want to lean into, to make it about something more than only the game”.

First, he added, “we need to have a great product. Then we can build the culture around everything.”

China steps up campaign for single people to date, marry and give birth

Women receive cold-calls about family planning and universities asked to offer ‘love courses’ to tackle demographic crisis

China has stepped up a nationwide campaign to convince single people to date, marry and have children as Beijing grapples with an increasingly severe demographic crisis.

Local governments are cold-calling married women to ask about their plans to have children and are handing out cash to parents to encourage them to have more than one child.

Universities have been asked to introduce so-called love courses for single students, and regular articles appear in state media about the benefits of having children.

China’s population is shrinking, with the number of deaths outstripping births, piling pressure on local governments to address an increasingly bleak demographic outlook.

“China’s population faces three major trends: ageing, low birth and low marriage rates,” said prominent economist Ren Zeping in an interview with domestic press last month. “There are fewer children and more elderly people. The speed and scale of China’s ageing is unprecedented.”

Beijing has pledged to offer subsidies and bigger tax cuts for parents to reduce the cost of raising children. The State Council, China’s cabinet, in October said it was drafting a plan to build a “birth-friendly society” as part of a broader stimulus package to tackle an ailing economy. Details of this plan are still being thrashed out.

In the meantime, married women in their 20s and early 30s across the country have been receiving calls from local officials asking about their plans to start a family, according to multiple people who spoke with the Financial Times and posts on social media.

In some instances, callers asked women to attend prenatal body checks. Other callers were more direct, offering subsidies to women who had more than one child. Couples need to have on average 2.1 children to reach the population replacement rate.

A Zhejiang resident who declined to be named said officials offered local women a Rmb100,000 ($14,000) subsidy for having a second child. “There is no explicit policy, but if you ask for it, the village will find you a way to get you the subsidy,” she said. Currently, subsidies for children are determined by local governments depending on their fiscal health.

The personalised lobbying comes against a background of an intensified media campaign hailing the benefits of childbirth. In recent months, the state-run People’s Daily and Life Times have promoted scientific voices saying childbirth is good for the mother’s health and can even help prevent cancer and treat certain diseases.

A state-run publication by the National Health Commission in December called on universities to set up “marriage and love education courses” to encourage students to couple up.

“Universities are an important place for college students to fall in love,” it wrote, citing a survey that 57 per cent of students said they did not want to get into a relationship due to their heavy workload.

The article proposed that universities introduce courses on the theory of love and real-life case analysis to promote a “systematic knowledge of love and marriage”.

However, experts are sceptical that official measures to bolster the birth rate will persuade young people to start families, especially as rising unemployment and tepid economic growth have reined in spending.

Wang Feng, an expert on Chinese demographics at the University of California, Irvine, said officials were resorting to the same “playbook of using administrative power to achieve demographic goals” that was evident during the one-child policy era, the 35 years from 1980 when families were restricted to having one child.

While Beijing successfully stopped couples from having multi-child families, it is harder to use administrative powers to achieve the opposite result, he said. “Such old wine in a new bottle will not be effective, as the rationale underlying late marriage and low fertility are entirely different.”

Shen Yang, a feminist writer, said people could “see through the propaganda”.

“If the government wants to bolster the birth rate, it should create a more friendly environment for parents, especially single mothers,” she said.

While Beijing is encouraging births, there are no signs that it has limited access to birth control or abortions. Although there may be specific instances of doctors refusing to carry out procedures, these often reflect concern about legal action from family members, said a gynaecologist in Beijing.

Still, Wang said authorities had an uphill battle convincing “young women and men today, who belong to the most educated generation in Chinese history” to have children.

“For young women especially, they not only face high living costs but also severe career penalties when they leave their work position to have children.”

Private equity payouts fell 50% short in 2024

Value of investments cashed out lingers well below historic average for third consecutive year

Private equity funds cashed out just half the value of investments they typically sell in 2024, the third consecutive year payouts to investors have fallen short because of a deal drought.

Buyout houses typically sell down 20 per cent of their investments in any given year, but industry executives forecast that cash payouts for the year would be about half that figure.

Cambridge Associates, a leading adviser to large institutions on their private equity investments, estimated that funds had fallen about $400bn short in payments to their investors over the past three years compared with historical averages.

The data underline the increasing pressure on firms to find ways to return cash to investors, including by exiting more investments in the year ahead.

Firms have struggled to strike deals at attractive prices since early 2022, when rising interest rates caused financing costs to soar and corporate valuations to fall.

Dealmakers and their advisers expect that merger and acquisition activity will accelerate in 2025, potentially helping the industry work through what consultancy Bain & Co. has called a “towering backlog” of $3tn in ageing deals that must be sold in the years ahead.

Several large public offerings this year including food transport giant Lineage Logistics, aviation equipment specialist Standard Aero and dermatology group Galderma have provided private equity executives with confidence to take companies public, while Donald Trump’s election has added to Wall Street exuberance.

But Andrea Auerbach, global head of private investments at Cambridge Associates, cautioned that the industry’s issues could take years to work through.

“There is an expectation that the wheels of the exit market will start to turn. But it doesn’t end in one year, it will take a couple of years,” Auerbach said.

Private equity firms have used novel tactics to return cash to investors while holdings have proved difficult to sell.

They have made increasing use of so-called continuation funds — where one fund sells a stake in one or more portfolio companies to another fund to another fund the firm manages — to engineer exits.

Jefferies forecasts that there will be $58bn of continuation fund deals in 2024, representing a record 14 per cent of all private equity exits. Such funds made up just 5 per cent of all exits in the boom year of 2021, Jefferies found.

But some private equity investors are sceptical that the industry will be able to sell assets at prices close to funds’ current valuations.

“You have a huge amount of capital that has been invested on assumptions that are no longer valid,” a large industry investor told the Financial Times.

They warned that a record $1tn-plus in buyouts were struck in 2021, just before interest rates rose, and many deals are carried on firms’ books at overly optimistic valuations.

Goldman Sachs recently noted in a report that private equity asset sales, which had historically been done at a premium of at least 10 per cent to funds’ internal valuations, have in recent years been made at discounts of 10-15 per cent.

“[Private] equity in general is still over-marked, which is leading to this situation where assets are still stuck,” said Michael Brandmeyer of Goldman Sachs Asset Management in the report.