The Association Monégasque contre les Myopathies (AMM) has postponed a November charity watch auction until 2024. This year’s event, which had been scheduled for Geneva, would have been the 10th more-or-less biennial occurrence of the auction since the Monaco-based AAM created the event in 2005. Since the event’s founding, it has raised a total of around 100 million euros ($100 million). A specific make-up date has not yet been announced.
The Only Watch auction funds a search for a cure to Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Only Watch features one-of-a kind timepieces designed expressly for the auction by high-end watchmakers. The postponement came amid what a statement on the AMM website termed “questions… about the allocation of funds and the governance of the AAM.”
“[T]he time for certification, changes in governance and the imminent auction do not coincide,” AMM officials wrote in the statement announcing the auction’s postponement. “We cannot bring ourselves to cast doubt on the sincerity of the commitment of all the parties involved in this project, nor can we allow this wonderful story to be rewritten.”
According to published reports, social media accounts from watch aficionados and enthusiast media companies questioned allocations of the proceeds raised by the auctions. In response, AMM issued a statement on October 23 noting in part that “a first in human clinical trial financed entirely by funds raised through OW [Only Watch], launched in June 2023 at the Garches hospital, in the Paris region.”
AMM further posted a statement about governance and transparency on its website, in which the organization noted it had: publicized financial statements for the years 2018 through 2022 (a period during which more than 70% of its funds had been raised); released bank statements showing more than half the total funds raises were still on its accounts and ready to fund next-step clinical developments; provided “a detailed list of projects supported for the past 10 years with names, institutions, amounts transferred; and released financial statements from two “sister companies” biotech firms, SQY Therapeutics and Synthena AG, which the charity had supported.
SQY Therapeutics and Synthena, however, were owned either by OW founder and AMM chairman Luc Pettavino himself or by organizations and entities affiliated with him, including parents of children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and the exact nature of this ownership was not transparent in the statement.
The statement did note that “we changed the shareholder structure of our biotech SQY Therapeutics (main recipient of the charity’s funds in the past years and sponsor of the ongoing clinical trial) to have it entirely owned by the charity associations involved and ended the temporary situation (in which 6 members of families of patients owned 51% of shares) that allowed the company to save about [1 million euros] thanks to a French state program. During this period, no dividends were distributed….”
Regardless, by the time AMM issued its statement watchmaker Audemars Piguet had announced it was pulling out from participating in the auction. Its offering would have carried an estimated hammer price of between $300,000 and $500,000, according to wristwatch enthusiast website Hodinkee. AMM cancelled the auction shortly thereafter.
According to the AMM statement, the organization is “taking actions and measures to ensure our processes and transparency are aligned with the level of impact our charity organization has had,” although it further noted that “[a]s a result, the charity’s functioning expenses will necessarily in crease beyond the current 1 to 2%, but we are happy to take these steps to give our structure the maturity and transparency this unique project deserves.”
