Geoffrey Smith is ideally suited to take on a senior role in the highly competitive auctioneering trade because, according to his new boss, he has “tremendous commercial acumen”.

It’s an interesting assessment to make of someone who, according to his CV, has spent his entire professional career working in a public gallery. And it’s all the more interesting considering that Smith has been at the centre of a conflict-of-interest scandal arising out of claims he made about his involvement in his ex-partner’s gallery business while he was on the public payroll.

After 16 years with the National Gallery of Victoria, Smith quit his job as senior curator two weeks ago as part of a settlement of a legal dispute with the gallery. Smith had taken the gallery to court after he was stood down on the strength of an internal NGV investigation that found he had a case to answer for alleged professional misconduct.

Smith started work today as national head of art for second-tier auction house Bonhams & Goodman. The position was created especially for him by Bonhams CEO Tim Goodman, who told Crikey he’d been talking to Smith for years about the possibility of them working together.

Smith will spearhead a brave attempt by Bonhams to step up into the quality end of the auction market, capitalising on Christies’s recent departure from Australia.

Speaking to Crikey for the first time since the so-called Curatorgate affair hit the headlines in early July, Smith declared that “the opportunities and the potential are huge” in his new job.

He shrugged off the intense scrutiny of the past few months. “I certainly don’t see it impacting in any negative way on what I will be doing here,” Smith said.

Smith will be raising the Sydney-based auction house’s profile in Melbourne, where he will set up new premises in Hawksburn, in the centre of Bleak City’s affluent inner east. “I believe Geoffrey Smith is quite unique,” Goodman told Crikey. “He’s not just an academic, he has a tremendous commercial acumen, and I have never found that combination in an arts academic before.”

Our conversation got a little tetchy when I asked Goodman what evidence he’d seen of Smith’s grasp of commercial matters when, for all his working life, the curator was supposed to have been engaged full-time in the taxpayer-funded service of a public institution.

Goodman said his assessment was based entirely on conversations he’d had with Smith over the years, and not on the strength of any business dealings between them, insisting that they’d never done any business together. The auction house boss said he’d carried out “exhaustive due diligence” before appointing Smith and couldn’t find “one skerrick of evidence that Geoffrey had been guilty of any impropriety”.