Spanish national police recently arrested an antiques dealer for selling a stolen Egyptian sculpture dated from 1450 BCE. The artifact was offered by a Swiss gallery during the most recent TEFAF Maastricht art fair for €190,000 ($202,000).
The suspect was charged with money laundering, smuggling, and falsifying documents.
“The arrested person was perfectly aware of the illicit origin of the Egyptian bust seized in the Netherlands,” stated a press release from Spanish authorities.
The press release stated that an investigation began after the Swiss gallery had learned the piece had been linked a Barcelona antiquities dealer with ties to the trade of goods from conflict zones in North Africa and the Middle East. The Swiss gallery had purchased the black granite head from a German gallery.
After the sculpture was given to Dutch police, authorities there sent a document to Spanish police reporting the item had been illegally marketed in Europe. Further investigation showed the granite sculpture had been acquired by the Spanish suspect in July 2015 from an international company based in Bangkok, Thailand.
Most importantly, the investigators were able to prove the Spanish gallery owner had falsified the provenance document for the sculpture and it was not part of a Spanish collection of archaeological objects from the 1970s. This false documentation was also what allowed the piece to be displayed at the TEFAF art fair.
While police did not name the suspect in public documents, Lynda Albertson, the president of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, has claimed in a blog post that the individual in question is Jaume Bagot Peix, operator of the J. Bagot Arqueología gallery in Barcelona, Spain.
In 2018, Vanity Fair Spain published a feature detailing how Bagot Peix was under police scrutiny for allegedly acquiring artifacts looted from Libya in a scheme that financially benefited the Islamic State.
The arrest surprised art crime expert Christopher Marinello, who founded the firm Art Recovery International after working at the Stolen Art Database for more than seven years.
“There has been a lot of publicity about US antiquities dealers being arrested for falsifying provenance but this Spanish dealer apparently didn’t get the memo that you can’t get away with this,” Marinello told the National.
“What stands out is that the police in the Netherlands worked really well with the Spanish police, so it was good to see international co-operation, which happens very rarely,” Marinello added.
Requests for comment from ARTnews to the J. Bagot Arqueología gallery and TEFAF Maastricht were not returned by press time.
