Accused Dealer Extradited from Hamburg to Paris to Face Charges

             Hamburger            

According to the The Art Newspaper ( Vincent Noce, 'Dealer suspected of selling looted antiquities to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Louvre Abu Dhabi detained in Paris' The Art Newspaper 25 March 2022)

[T]he dealer suspected by US and French authorities of playing a central role in the sale of allegedly looted antiquities to museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, has been arrested in Hamburg and transferred to France to face charges.

Meanwhile the persons who played a central role in the destruction of archaeological contexts - the artefact hunters and middlemen (organized gangs?) are not even being sought. We may doubt that the dealer kept any records that would allow them to be traced, let alone brought to account. So the dealer will have to take the responsibility for this alone. Reportedly, he has been charged for gang fraud and money laundering (no mention of culture-crime) and is being held in detention following his arrest last week. As Noce continues: 

In 2020, the French expert Christophe Kunicki and his husband, Richard Semper, were arrested and charged in Paris for an the alleged large-scale trafficking of looted artefacts from Egypt and the Middle East, before being held under house arrest in south-western France. Kunicki [had] sold a golden sarcophagus to the Met in 2017 for €3.5m. In 2019, the museum apologised and returned it to Egypt, after a criminal investigation exposed serious flaws in the Egyptian department’s provenance check. In his report, Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, stated that the sarcophagus came from the German-Lebanese dealer Roben Dib and the Simonian brothers, with a "forged" provenance. The same year, the District Attorney also seized an Egyptian stele on its way to being exhibited at Tefaf New York—it was also returned to Egypt.

I have been following in posts on this blog the news items on the Nedjemankh affair and Kunicki for some time. Let's just get the perspective here, the Golden Sarcophagus was sold in 2017, five years it's taken them to get this far. And of course all accusations are merely that until any eventual conviction. So basically we are nowhere except a few decontextualised artefacts being dumped on the museums service of the source country from which the objects had been clandestinely removed by bad actors. 

French investigators also suspect Dib of having sold (via Kunicki) five major Egyptian works to the Louvre Abu Dhabi for more than €50m, including another golden sarcophagus and a Fayum portrait. The museum has never made any comment, but Dib tells The Art Newspaper that Bogdanos's reports were "complete lies". According to him, the artefacts came from the late Simon Simonian, who was a dealer in Cairo from 1969 to 1984, and all had legitimate export documents dating to the 1970s.

I think the Abu Dhabi information here is new. Presumably the dealers handling this material that had access to the 1970s documents of legitimate export of items of this value will during their verification process have secured copies and passed them on to the buyers. It should therefore be relatively easy to produce them in court. After all, even selling something as humble as a hamburger requires there to be a paper trail showing the meat has passed the requisite checks, so why would a seller, or buyer, think something like high-end antiquities would be excepted from such requirements?