Sometime last year, if I remember correctly, I was joking with a senior auction figure at another house when he made reference to the rampant side dealing taking place at Sotheby’s. We traded some anecdotes and agreed that we were both taken aback by how far down into the organization the practice had spread. “It’s like a pirate ship over there,” my interlocutor said. That phrase stuck with me.

I’m strangely sympathetic to the side dealing. Drahi’s entire M.O.—as Knight’s article demonstrates—is to buy companies and strip them down to the lowest possible costs, often allowing his partners to enrich themselves with side deals. In the piece, Knight wrote extensively about Drahi’s partner, Armando Pereira, who is under investigation in Portugal for allegedly demanding kickbacks from vendors, and Pereira’s son-in-law, Yossi Benchetrit, who was fired from his role overseeing a $2 billion budget at Altice for refusing to participate in a similar investigation. (Pereira, who got his passport back after a brief detention last year, still hasn’t been charged with anything.)

It would appear from the article that Drahi has approached the specialist staff in the same way. He’s cut their salaries and their bonuses. The only other benefit to working at Sotheby’s for them now is the ability to trade on their connections and earn money on the side, essentially freelancing. The whole thing reads like a passage from a 19th century novel where an East India Company functionary comes home from the subcontinent inexplicably rich.

I had originally thought all of this lived in a grey area that is hard to police. After all, Sotheby’s says in the New Yorker article that its employees are allowed to buy and sell works of art for their own collections. There don’t seem to be any requirements for how long a work actually stays in that collection. Nevertheless, it turns out there’s a big difference between becoming a principal in a trade—reaping profit from taking risk—and what appears to be going on at Sotheby’s.

According to The New Yorker, Sotheby’s specialists are taking commissions on sales they broker between two other parties. In many cases, neither of these parties would transact directly through Sotheby’s. You might argue that this is no big deal, and even if the salesperson were put in a position to broker the deal through their role at Sotheby’s, where’s the harm? Isn’t this just a sign that Sotheby’s staff are swashbuckling go-getters?

That’s where I got an education this week. First, a lawyer explained that these deals likely violate Sotheby’s conditions of employment. If Drahi wants to turn a blind eye, however, there’s not much anyone can do. Which means this is a bit like adultery, and Drahi seems to like having an open marriage with his employees. It’s worth pushing the metaphor to make it a little easier to see where the harm lies. Drahi’s apparent amorality is such that he can’t understand that others take these things seriously. And, perhaps, he doesn’t understand that not only is everyone else not a libertine, but there are people who might not want to do business with them.

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