Richard Mille RM016 Watch

Two safes containing luxury watches worth €3m (£2.5m) have been stolen from a Paris warehouse. The theft took place in the eighth district of the French capital, at a storage facility for luxury watchmaker Richard Mille. One of the police sources said the safes had not been attached to anything. Local residents alerted police after noticing strange activities in the area on Sunday night. The wealthier districts of Paris are home to some of the world’s top brands, making them a prime target for robberies. In 2020, one of the watches appeared for sale at Sotheby’s Hong Kong. Art Recovery International’s Chris Marinello, acting on behalf of Richard Mille, had the watch withdrawn from the sale and negotiated an unconditional release of the watch back to the manufacturer. In the few years since the theft, the watch had travelled from Paris, to Bangkok, to Hong Kong in what has become one of several established routes for stolen high-end watches.