Leonardo da Vinci painting, about to be sold for $135 million, seized at Swiss bank

A leading Italian da Vinci expert, Carlo Pedretti, has said he believes the work to be the completed oil version of the Mona Lisa artist's sketch of d'Este, which now hangs in the Louvre in Paris.

ROME (AFP).- A hugely valuable painting believed to be the work of Leonardo da Vinci has been seized from a Swiss bank on the orders of Italian police who suspect it was moved out of the country illegally. Italian prosecutors said Tuesday that the painting, a portrait of Renaissance noblewoman Isabella d'Este, had been seized from a vault in Lugano, near the Italian border.

At the time of its seizure on Monday, negotiations were under way to sell the painting -- which reportedly belongs to a wealthy Italian family based in Switzerland -- for 120 million euros (over $135 million), the prosecutors said in a statement. The painting was found to be in Switzerland in 2013 after Italian authorities were alerted that a local lawyer had been given a mandate to sell it for a minimum of 95 million euros.

A leading Italian da Vinci expert, Carlo Pedretti, has said he believes the work to be the completed oil version of the Mona Lisa artist's sketch of d'Este, which now hangs in the Louvre in Paris. Other experts have cast doubt on whether the painting is 100 percent the work of Leonardo, suggesting it could have simply been done in his style on the basis of the Louvre sketch, or started by the master and completed at a later date by one or more of his students. Italy holds one of the world's largest concentrations of artistic heritage and is often the target of art traffickers. Italian police in January seized over 5,000 ancient artefacts in a record 45-million-euro haul after dismantling a Swiss-Italian trafficking ring.


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Italian government seizes more than 5,000 looted antiquities in record 45-million-euro haul!

The Italian government on Wednesday said police had seized more than 5,000 ancient artefacts in a record 45-million-euro haul after dismantling a Swiss-Italian trafficking ring. Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said it was the country's "largest discovery yet" of looted works and consisted of 5,361 pieces, including vases, jewellery, frescoes and bronze statues, all dating from the 8th century BC to the 3rd century AD. The archaeological treasures came from illegal digs across Italy and "will be returned to where they were found", the minister told reporters.

Police said the items were worth around 45 million euros ($52 million) and were sold across the world with forged certificates of authenticity. The hoard was discovered as part of an investigation into Italian art dealer Gianfranco Becchina, who owns an art gallery in Switzerland, and his Swiss wife. The probe, which also involved Swiss police, revealed the existence of a sophisticated smuggling network between the two countries and prompted raids on several warehouses in Basel where hundreds of artefacts were recovered. Carabinieri general Mariano Mossa, who heads a special Italian police unit specialising in stolen art, said the looted works were sent to Switzerland to be restored before being sold in Germany, Britain, the United States, Japan and Australia using counterfeit provenance papers. Becchina was detained by Italian police while his wife was arrested by Swiss police. The Italian authorities have promised to put the artefacts found in the raids on display to the public.

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Missing Painting "San Luca Evangelista" by Pietro Bellotti Returned after 35 Years

VENICE.- Thanks to the work of the Carabinieri, an oil on canvas attributed to Pietro Bellotti, taken illegally 35 years ago from Castello Cini Monselice was recovered. After the theft, the painting exchanged hands several times and ended up "belonging" to a French collector who had tried to put it on sale at the Artcurial auction house in Paris in 2009. In this image: San Luca Evangelista, by Pietro Bellotti, courtesy Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Photo: Matteo De Fina.

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Four Romanians Must Pay 18 Million Euros over Kunsthal Museum Rotterdam Art Heist

This image taken on August 8, 2013 shows stolen paintings from Rotterdam Kunst Museum during a press conference at the National History Museum of Romania in Bucharest. Four Romanians have been found guilty of the theft of seven paintings on July 14, 2014 and sentenced to pay 18,1 million euros as the paintings remain unfound. The works stolen include Picasso's "Tete d'Arlequin", Monet's "Waterloo Bridge" and Lucian Freud's "Woman with Eyes Closed". AFP PHOTO DANIEL MIHAILESCU.


BUCHAREST (AFP).- Four Romanians behind a spectacular art heist in the Netherlands were ordered Monday to pay 18 million euros, with the fate of the stolen masterpieces by Picasso, Monet, Gauguin and Lucien Freud still a mystery. Seven paintings that were temporarily on display at the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam were stolen in 2012 in a raid that lasted only three minutes, in what the Dutch media called "the theft of the century". A court in the Romanian capital ordered the heist's mastermind Radu Dogaru, his mother Olga, Eugen Darie and Adrian Procop to reimburse the paintings' insurers. Prosecutors put the total value of the haul at over 18 million euros (over $24 million) while art experts at the time of the heist had claimed the paintings were worth up to 100 million euros.

Olga Dogaru told investigators she burned the paintings in her stove in the sleepy village of Carcaliu in eastern Romania in a bid to protect her son when he could not sell them. She later retracted the statement but a separate investigation is under way to determine if the masterpieces did end up in ashes. Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, director of Romania's National History Museum, said evidence of "painting primer, the remains of canvas and paint" were found in the stove, but experts must determine whether the ashes came from the missing paintings.

The works include Monet's "Waterloo Bridge, London" and Picasso's "Harlequin Head". None of them was equipped with an alarm. "We will contest the ruling," Catalin Dancu, the Dogarus' lawyer, told AFP. "In the first place, we don't believe the stolen paintings were the originals and secondly it is up to the museum to pay because it took the stupid risk of displaying the artwork without a proper surveillance system," he added. The paintings had been loaned to the museum for a show to celebrate its 20th anniversary by the Triton Foundation, which was set up to look after the art collection amassed by the Dutch investor Willem Cordia, who died in 2011. The canvases were transported to Romania hidden in pillowcases and prosecutors think they were destroyed after a failed attempt to sell them. Radu Dogaru, 30, who admitted planning the heist, was sentenced to six years in prison in February, and his accomplice Darie to five years and four months. On Monday, Procop was handed a sentence of four years and eight months while Dogaru's mother was jailed for two years.

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Recovered Matisse "Odalisque in Red Pants" Returned to Venezuelan Authorities!

In this file combo shows the original painting by Henri Matisse titled "Odalisque in Pants," left, next to a fake version that was on display in the Sofia Imber Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas, Venezuela. On Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2013, a federal judge in Miami sentenced a Cuban and Mexican 33 and 21 months in prison, respectively, for trying to sell the painting by Henri Matisse stolen from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas. The Caracas museum bought it in 1981.

CARACAS (AFP).- A painting by Henri Matisse that was stolen more than a decade ago in Caracas and later recovered in an FBI sting was turned over Monday to Venezuelan authorities. The "Odalisque in Red Pants" disappeared from the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas after being replaced with a fake sometime between 1999 and 2002. It was recovered in Miami Beach in 2012 in an FBI undercover operation that led to the convictions of Pedro Antonio Marcuello Guzman, a US citizen, and Maria Martha Elisa Ornelas Lazo, a Mexican. "The work is in extraordinary condition, with only slight imperfections on the edges, but it is fine," Joel Espinoza, an official with Venezuela's attorney general's office, said in a televised interview from Austin Texas. Painted in 1925 by the French master, the Odalisque has been valued at more than $3 million.

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U.S. Pushes Germany to Reveal Hoard of Nazi-Looted Art Germany is skirting an international deal on the restitution of art to Holocaust victims, U.S. negotiator tells TIME

More than 20 months have passed since German authorities uncovered a hidden trove of hundreds of artworks that the Nazis looted during the Holocaust. Yet only 79 of those works, which were found in the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of Adolf Hitler‘s art dealer, have so far been made public. The secrecy, intended to protect Gurlitt’s right to privacy, has left many victims of Nazi confiscation unable to file claims for their art to be returned. Now, the apparent lack of transparency on the part of German authorities has urged the U.S. to start applying diplomatic pressure on behalf of Holocaust survivors and their heirs. “This list of artworks needs to be published,” Stuart Eizenstat, the adviser to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Holocaust issues, told TIME in an interview Wednesday.

In 1998, more than 40 countries, including the U.S. and Germany, signed an agreement known as the Washington Principles, which outline necessary steps for the return of art looted by the Nazis. Serving at the time as Under Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, Eizenstat organized and led the negotiation of that agreement on behalf of the U.S., and he insists that Germany is at risk of violating the principles by keeping Gurlitt’s hoard from the public. “The basic principle,” he says, “is that every effort should be made to publicize art that’s found to have been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted in order to locate their pre-war owners.”

On Nov. 8, the U.S. embassy in Berlin issued an official démarche to the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as well as the German Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Culture, urging that the list of paintings found in Gurlitt’s apartment be published, Eizenstat says. (The U.S. embassy does not appear to have publicized that démarche, and an embassy spokesman could not immediately confirm when reached by TIME on Friday whether it had indeed been issued.)

Four days later, on Nov. 12, German authorities published 25 of the works on the government-run website LostArt.de, promising that the list would be “continuously updated.” But the slow drip of the disclosures since then has not satisfied Eizenstat or the potential claimants waiting to see if their art works were among those found in Gurlitt’s possession. References to Gurlitt’s privacy, which is protected under German law, does not win much sympathy from Eizenstat. “Whose privacy is it they’re trying to protect?” he says. “The families want to know what happened to their art, the museums want to know what happened to their art. And he has no right to privacy if he got them, or his father got them, in an untoward way.”

Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, is known to have helped the Nazis sell off the art they looted or confiscated from German museums and private collectors, most of whom were Jewish. The younger Gurlitt, in an interview published on Sunday, told the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel that his father had legally acquired all of the 1406 artworks from art dealers and museums, reportedly including works by Renoir, Picasso and Matisse. He also raised the issue of privacy, telling Der Spiegel: “What kind of government are they to show my private property?”

On Thursday, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that about 310 of the works would be returned to Gurlitt, citing the Bavarian prosecutor in charge of the case. These works are “undoubtedly the property of the accused,” the prosecutor, Reinhard Nemetz, was quoted as saying. As for the rest of the works, their review will be completed next week at the latest, the prosecutor told Süddeutsche Zeitung. But fighting over the ownership of these works in German courts would be a losing struggle for Holocaust survivors, art lawyers and experts told TIME this week, as Gurlitt would be able to invoke Germany’s statute of limitations for such cases to protect himself from civil lawsuits.

That is part of the reason the Washington Principles laid out a restitution process not tied up in regular courts. After seeking out and publishing any art works suspected of being Nazi loot, Germany is mandated under that agreement to form a special government commission to review any claims to their ownership. In Gurlitt’s case, if the commission finds that he is the legal owner, he gets to keep the artworks in question. If the ownership is in doubt, the commission can also rule that the art should be sold and the proceeds split between Gurlitt and the claimant. “The principles envision a number of creative solutions, just and fair solutions. But none of that is possible without the initial publication,” says Eizenstat. Without it, “You’d just be flying in the blind, because you wouldn’t know what to negotiate.”

So far in the Gurlitt case, Germany does not appear to have complied with any of the steps in this process, even though it has been “exemplary” in implementing the Washington Principles over the past decade, says Eizenstat. However, since the Principles are not legally binding, the only thing foreign diplomats can do is apply moral and diplomatic pressure on Germany to comply.

At the top of the federal hierarchy, that seems to be working. Numerous German ministers, as well as the spokesman for Chancellor Merkel, have called for urgency and transparency in the Gurlitt case since it began to draw international outrage earlier this month. “The problem is with some of the Bavarian prosecutor’s issues, like privacy and the tax evasion case.” Suspected tax evasion is what led German authorities to search Gurlitt’s apartment in February 2012, when they first stumbled upon his hoard of art.

Since then, the prosecutors handling the investigation in Bavaria have continued to treat it as a case of tax evasion rather than of stolen or looted art. For Eizenstat, that reveals a weakness in the agreement he negotiated 15 years ago. “It indicates that subnational units like the Bavarian government have difficulty with the Washington Principles, which are principles subscribed to by the national governments,” he says. So at the local level, the authorities are apparently able to keep Nazi loot under wraps – at least until the moral and political pressure from their superiors comes bearing down.

Read more: U.S. Pushes Germany to Reveal Hoard of Nazi-Looted Art | TIME.com http://world.time.com/2013/11/22/u-s-pushes-germany-to-reveal-hoard-of-nazi-looted-art/#ixzz2lR4u3p7d

Justice is finally served! Valerie Cooper goes to jail, charged with fraud after stealing over half a million of tax payers dollars!

Valerie Cooper, the former Art Gallery of Calgary CEO who defrauded her employer of $100,000, has been sentenced to a year in jail.

She will also get a year of probation, 80 hours of community service and is banned from being employed in a position with signing authority on financial accounts.

Cooper admitted in July to defrauding her employer through false expense claims over a three-year period.

Some of the money went to pay for her condo rental, unauthorized travel and personal expenses like clothing, cleaning and massage services.

Valerie Cooper, former CEO of Art Gallery of Calgary, was charged with multiple counts of fraud in May 2012 after the charitable organization said it was missing $500,000.

Cooper said in the past that she never even knew what fraud meant but she did not mean to hurt the gallery, as she loved working there.

The Crown had asked for two years less a day while her defence had asked for no jail but a conditional sentence order instead.
"I'm somewhat disappointed that she wasn't given a conditional sentence order in the circumstances; however, clearly I think the sentence was within the range," said defence lawyer Willie de Wit.

He said his client is also disappointed.
"This is not a person that goes around and knowingly commits criminal offences. The whole gist of argument was she thought she was owed this money ... and made a mistake with respect to how she tried to get it back," said de Wit.

Judge Anne Brown said breach of trust, the amount and duration of the fraud and the fact that the art gallery is a non-profit organization were aggravating factors in today's sentence.

But she also took into account when deciding her fate that Cooper had no criminal record, she is well educated and she entered a guilty plea.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/valerie-cooper-former-art-gallery-ceo-gets-jail-time-for-fraud-1.2325953