Law, crime and regulation

A BANKRUPT Suffolk antiques dealer who went on the run to Bulgaria after swindling creditors in a £1.9m fraud has been jailed for ten years.

SPECULATION is rising that many more restituted works of art may end up being offered for sale following a ruling made by Vienna’s city council.

A COUPLE dealing in antique desks have issued a warning over internet addresses after discovering that a rival was using their name to divert potential customers to his own website.

Six months after the most significant hallmarking deception case in living memory, the Assay Office has published a guide detailing many of the Peter Ashley-Russell fakes and forgeries. The document is available to download for free at www.thegoldsmiths.co.uk/assayoffice

LAWRENCE B. Salander, the former owner of the bankrupt Manhattan art gallery Salander-O’Reilly, has been charged in a 100-count indictment with stealing $88m. He faces up to 25 years in prison.

THE UK government has acceded to European Union rules which would see the extradition of suspects like antiquities dealer Malcolm Hay.

THE Greek courts have sentenced an English antiquities dealer to three years in jail after convicting him in his absence on charges linked to stolen artefacts.

Just hours before Sotheby’s sold the contents of Gianni Versace’s Lake Como villa on March 18, they withdrew an 18th century portrait by Johann Zoffany after its subject’s family claimed that it had been stolen from their home in London 30 years ago.

AUCTIONEERS’ liability for their catalogue descriptions may soon stretch far beyond the saleroom – even to third parties not involved in bidding – if plaintiffs win a pending New York test case.

DAVID Smith of Neptune Fine Art, the dealer who was duped into buying a fake Lowry painting, has told ATG that potential buyers should be exceptionally careful when considering purchasing a Lowry painting.

COSMETICS giant L’Oréal took their multi-pronged legal tussle with online auction site eBay to the High Court in London last week.

DUTCH police have recovered eight paintings stolen from Robert Noortman’s gallery in Maastricht in 1987. The works, which included valuable works by Renoir and Pissarro, were traced to two small towns in the south of Holland after an alleged middleman in Dubai made an attempt to sell the paintings back to the insurers for a reported €5m (£4.5m).

DERBYSHIRE police are investigating a theft of diamond jewellery from a dealer’s hotel room after he returned from exhibiting at Dragon Fairs’ two-day Derby University fair.

POLICE are urging churches to review their security measures after 20 pieces of valuable silver were stolen in raids on three churches in Warwickshire villages in under a week.

A FORMER president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association has admitted stealing dozens of books from Sir Evelyn de Rothschild valued at a total of around £230,000.

THE Inland Revenue are calling for more firms to use their new Business Payment Support Service after receiving more than 44,500 phone calls asking for help since it was launched in November.

Readers are being urged to be aware of a new batch of counterfeit Troika wares that are being offered for sale on eBay.

THE appeal of Paris as an auction centre for jewellery received a boost at the start of the year, when France slashed import VAT on “rare” or “high value” jewellery from 19.6 per cent to 5.5 per cent.

The Irish Government have decided to go the same way as the UK in not applying the Artist’s Resale Right (ARR) to the heirs of dead artists until 2012. The extension means that ARR will continue to apply to works by living artists only.

A CHALK drawing of an ‘elephant graveyard’ appeared earlier this month at the entrance to the Portobello Road Market. The three-dimensional pavement art depicting an elephant carcass was the work of representatives for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), who in recent years have singled out the weekly antiques market in its campaign to curb the illegal trade in modern elephant ivory.