Law, crime and regulation

EXPERIMENTAL technology designed to determine the age of ceramics by scientific means is now being put to use at the heart of the Chinese works of art trade.

MASSACHUSETTS has become the 14th state to ban the sale of novelty cigarette lighters.

A COLLECTION of 85 bosuns’ calls was among items stolen from a home in Milan in early August. Most of the calls were British, but there were also examples from the USA, Italy, China and India.

DEALERS Down Under have successfully fought off the recommendations of a government report that threatened to disrupt the status quo in the Australian art market.

THIEVES have stolen a safe containing £25,000 worth of silver from a church in Woodmangreen, just north of Midhurst, Sussex.

ATG has learnt that the government is seriously considering withdrawing export licences for much of the old rhinoceros horn sold in the UK.

MOST antiques that include the “parts and derivatives” of endangered species enjoy an exemption from CITES controls known as the “worked item” derogation.

IN a confiscation hearing earlier this month, Maurice Taylor, the man jailed last March for three years for selling a fake Lowry painting, was warned that he faced a further ten years in prison unless he paid back almost £1.2m deemed to be the proceeds of fraud.

THE trial of a man accused of the burglary of a number of remote country houses in East Anglia has begun in Ipswich Crown Court.

DISGRACED New York art dealer Lawrence Salander has been jailed for a minimum of six years after pleading guilty to orchestrating one of the world’s biggest ever art frauds.

IN the early hours of August 6, a Henry Moore sketch and two oil paintings were stolen from Trinity House on the High Street in Broadway, south Worcestershire.

AFTER more than a decade of targeting unsuspecting dealers, scam advertising company European City Guide have struck again.

THE future of the Export Review Licensing service is under review again after Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced the scrapping of the Museums and Libraries Association (MLA) which administers it.

A SERIES of guidelines designed to encourage standard and proper practice in the fine art auction industry in China were unveiled on June 31. They are the first measures of their type since sales by auction were permitted to resume in the People’s Republic 23 years ago.

EXTENDING the Artist’s Resale Right (ARR) to the estates of dead artists after 2012 poses a serious threat to the 60,000 jobs the UK art industry supports. That is the view of the view of the British Art Market Federation (BAMF), which is calling on Brussels to delay the move and allow all member states to adopt the derogation until ARR is accepted globally.

KEY to BAMF’s cause is the European Commission’s (EC) failure to follow the terms of its own Directive.

INVESTORS and artists in Australia are in uproar at proposals to ban self-managed pensions from putting their money in art.

POLICE in Surrey are seeking information about this man, pictured here, in connection with the theft of six paintings and Georgian writing desk worth total of around £25,000 from an antiques shop in Dorking earlier this month.

THE Federation of European Art Gallery Associations has added its voice to the debate over the Artist’s Resale Right, demanding the European Commission carry out the promised impact study immediately.

THE European Commission has reneged on a legal undertaking to review the effects of the Artist’s Resale Right in the UK before it is extended to the estates of dead artists.