Most expensive Lamborghini ever: Veneno Roadster sells for £6.7 million
One of the world’s most exceptional collections of supercars – with one of the most shocking stories behind it – was sold by Bonhams in Switzerland at the weekend, setting a world record and raising more than £19 million for charity.
Twenty five of the world’s fastest and rarest supercars – the ill-gotten collection of just one man – all came with no reserve prices and were all quickly snapped up in this millionaires’ supercar sale of the century. Highlight was a Lamborghini Veneno Roadster which shot past its estimate to sell for £6.7m to become the most expensive Lamborghini ever sold at auction.
Widely considered the ultimate collectible modern-day Lamborghini, the Veneno was Lamborghini’s present to itself to mark its 50th anniversary in 2013. A year after five 740bhp, 221mph V12 coupes were produced Lamborghini made a run of nine roadsters, and it was one of these that became the most valuable raging bull ever at Bonhams Bonmont sale in Switzerland on Sunday (29th September).
After an opening bid of three million Swiss francs, six bidders fought for the car over seven minutes, to the astonishment of the audience. The car, with just 200 miles up, eventually went to a private collector for CHF 8.28 million, or £6,768,709 including the auction premium.
Other million-pound cars in the amazing collection included a 2015 Koenigsegg One:1 (£3.76m), a Ferrari Enzo (£2.54), a Ferrari LaFerrari (£1.60m), a Porsche 918 Spyder (£1.27m), an Aston Martin One-77 (£1.27m), a Bugatti Veyron (£1.07m), a McLaren P1 (£1.03m) and Porsche Turbo S Leichtbau, (£940,098).
All of them, along with other high performance sports cars and luxury limousines, in total raised 23.4m Swiss francs, or around £19.1m – almost twice what Bonhams had estimated the sale would make. The collection was being sold by the state of Geneva, which is donating the proceeds of the sale to charity – believed to be for funding social programmes to help people in Equatorial Guinea.
It was the son of that country’s president who put the collection together, after a supercar-buying splurge epic in its scale. It has since been shown that Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue used state funds to pay for his supercar obsession. After a corruption investigation into the playboy politician’s lavish taste, the cars were confiscated in 2016 by the authorities in Switzerland, where they were stored, and Mangue has since been convicted in France of misappropriation of state funds.
As well as the supercar collection, Bonhams’ first sale in Switzerland for 10 years saw many other classics and supercars going to new homes, with anther Lamborghini, a 2010 Reventon roadster, selling for almost CHF2m (£1.6m). Among older classics, a 1963 Ferrari 250 GTE 2+2 Series III four-seater grand tourer sold for CHF 508,875 (£415,000).
In all, the Bonhams Bonmont Sale raised CHF 36.7m (£30m), a result welcomed by Bonhams’ motoring chairman James Knight who told us: “We’re delighted with today’s results. Not only have we raised a considerable sum for charity, we have also established a world record for selling a Lamborghini at auction.”
Images courtesy of Bonhams.
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