Law, crime and regulation

A man has been sentenced to life in prison for the “cold and calculated” killing of a silver dealer.

The Stradivarius violin which was stolen from Euston station in 2010 and recovered earlier this year will be offered at Tarisio auctioneers this month.

Jewellery worth between £10,000 and £15,000 has been stolen from Harrogate Antiques Centre.

EDITOR’S COMMENT – In 2001, I had the privilege of being the first journalist to quiz the then arts minister, Alan Howarth, on recommendations submitted by an expert panel investigating measures for tackling the illicit trade in cultural goods.

Talks have begun once more on creating a national stolen property database to tackle the £300m problem of heritage and cultural property crime.

The sale by Christie’s of 24 items of Chinese ceramics from Croydon’s Riesco Collection will go ahead after a legal challenge failed through lack of funds.

A sale at Chippenham Auction Rooms had to be cancelled after thieves broke in overnight by removing tiles from the roof.

Campaigners against the sale of 24 items of Chinese ceramics from Croydon council’s Riesco Collection were in a race against time to raise money for their judicial review.

The French art world has welcomed their government’s decision to cut, rather than increase, the rate on tax for works imported in to France from outside the EU.

ATG’s sister operation, online auction platform the-saleroom.com, has gone some way to solving the problem of alerting auctioneers to rogue bidders under the Data Protection Act.

Another Henry Moore sculpture has been taken in the latest in a spate of thefts targeting works by the artist.

Auctioneer John Nicholson has called for a review of data protection rules when it comes to alerting salerooms to serial non-payers and problem bidders.

Martin Roberts, the UK specialist who worked as a consultant on the Punta Cana site, discusses the importance of the Pewter Wreck.

Officers carrying out a fraud investigation at Stuart Porter Antiques in Stamford are asking any small dealers who rented space at the premises to contact them.

Three fraudsters have been sentenced for a widespread scam using dud cheques at antiques fairs across the country.

A Nobel Peace Prize medal stolen from the Lord Mayor’s Mansion House in Newcastle is still missing despite a 21-year-old man being jailed for the theft.

The Jane Austen’s House Museum at Chawton in Hampshire has raised the £150,000 needed to keep a gold turquoise ring once owned by Jane Austen in the country.

The trade have strongly backed our comment last week calling into question the reliability of claims that 40% of antiques on the UK market are fakes or forgeries.

Police have launched an investigation into a suspected fraud centred on a Lincolnshire antiques business.

Recent publicity for the new TV series ‘Treasure Detectives’ prompted a number of articles claiming that 40% of all antiques on the UK market are fakes.