Daslu is sold at auction for 10 times the minimum value; the deal is already the subject of a legal dispute

Daslu, the designer label that was a benchmark for luxury in Brazil, was auctioned off for R$10 million, ten times more than the initial price of R$1.411 million. The judicial auction took place at around 1.30pm on Tuesday. The name of the buyer cannot be disclosed immediately, only after the entire process has been completed. The auction received a total of 32 bids from five different participants. According to the Sodré Santoro auction house, the dispute was fierce. The auction started with an initial bid of R$1.4 million, which corresponded to the updated value of the brand's appraisal, and reached a sale price of R$10 million. The expert's report that accompanied the Daslu case in 2005 estimated that the intangible part of the brand had a value of R$500 million. With depreciation, the amount fell to R$1.2 million. "Daslu's new owner believes that the brand has an added value that is worth it," says lawyer Mariana Valverde, a partner at Moreau Valverde Advogados, who specializes in intellectual property, trademarks and patents. Justice The auction was authorized by the courts in the Daslu bankruptcy proceedings, which are being held in one of the specialized courts in the capital of São Paulo. According to Valor, the auction is already the subject of a dispute in the courts between the current owners of the brand, the bankrupt DSL Comércio Varejista (which bought the business in 2011) and the judicial administrator, Expertisemais Perícias. The dispute is over the brand's valuation, said Roberto Castro de Figueiredo, DSL's lawyer. DSL points to an appraisal of R$40 million, four times higher than the value of the bid. It is important to note that the trademark cannot be passed on to the new owner until the TJSP has ruled on the dispute. The new owner of the brand will have the right to all of its "sub-brands", such as Daslulu, for animals, and others, such as Terraço Daslu, Daslu Vintage, Daslulabel, Villa Daslu, DasluShoe Space, which offer everything from decorative items, bedding and bath, clothes, cosmetics and handbags, to jewelry, property management, events and party items, and audio and video. And now also the website domain. It's worth remembering that it hasn't all been luxury in Daslu's history. In 2005, siblings Eliana Tranchesi and Antonio Carlos Piva de Albuquerque, owners of the brand, were arrested during a mega-operation called Operation Narciso. The siblings were accused of irregular importation with crimes of tax evasion and import fraud. In short, Daslu was accused of under-invoicing imports, i.e. declaring the value of the garments to be much lower than the real value, with the simple aim of evading taxes. After this operation, which took Daslu from the pages of luxury magazines to the police pages of the daily newspapers, the business went downhill, culminating in an unglamorous end for a brand that for a long time was a sign of status. Contributors Cristian Favaro and Natália Flach, Valor