Auction Scandal may devalue stamp market
Published May 15th, 2006
Two Spanish companies, Afinsa and Forum Filatelico, are accused of swindling almost 350,000 Spanish investors out of more than €5 million through pyramid-style schemes.
European stamp dealers, collectors and investors are waiting anxiously to see whether the scandal will cause long-term damage to the international stamp market, worth an estimated $13 billion a year.
A source at the Universal Postal Union in Switzerland told Britain’s The Times that a global fall in the price of collectible stamps, for the first time since the 1980s, was probable.
Shares in Afinsa’s US subsidiary Escala Group, one of the biggest global players in the coins, stamps and collectibles business, collapsed after the raids. But Stanley Gibbons, the British stamp auctioneer and catalogue publisher that offers a rare stamps investment scheme of its own, also suffered, despite having no links to the scandal.
Shares in the company fell 12 per cent last Wednesday before staging a partial recovery on Friday.
Richard Perkis, one of the company’s directors, was confident that the investigations in Spain would not affect the long-term value of the rare stamps from Britain and the Commonwealth in which Stanley Gibbons specialises.
“Afinsa and Forum Filatelico were mainly selling Spanish or Portuguese stamps.
“There’s no reason why it should damage the international stamp market,” Mr Perkis said.
